new toshiba with system disc or disc error and black screen

A

astapasta

Member
Hello everyone,

I have a Toshiba laptop ( 12 months old with vista installed ) . It now has elapsed into a very strange condition..! The screen appears totally black but if you look closely and squint your eyes , i can see that it actually starts up and reports a "non system disk or disk error, please insert dos diskette and press any key". I cannot seem to get into the dos system at all and, of course there was no reboot/recovery disks with the product.
I dont have anything that i need to save on the computer so if anyone knows how to help me, they dont have to worry about loosing any data. I am going to try to make a boot disk and reboot but i dont hold out much hope at the moment. Please any suggestions would be gratefull.:smile:

astapasta
 
Hi Astapasta, welcome to NST.
I take it that the lack of bootable media means that the PC came with a recovery partition ?
This would seem to be accessed in the following manner, as gleaned from a web search.

Press and hold the 0 (zero) key on your keyboard and then depress the computer's power switch. When the computer turns on, the Toshiba HDD Recovery Utility screen will appear, presenting three options
 
Hi Terry60,

Thanks for your reply. I cant get in to the recovery utility. Holding the 0 button and pressing power dosent work. I can now however get into the dos page. Any ideas? The reboot disk i made dosent seem to make any difference.

astapasta.
 
Are you holding down the "0" whilst powering the PC up from a complete power off state ?
It won't work when the system is already running.
This advice comes from a Toshiba website as you'll see from the link.
If it doesn't work at all, then your recovery partition must be u/s too.
In that case your only option would be to contact Toshiba for a bootable recovery disk. They'll probably charge you a nominal fee, because they gave you the option of creating your own recovery disk from the recovery partition.
You cannot use the recovery disks from this site to reinstall Vista, they contain no installation files.
They are purely to fix a broken boot process, or instigate a system restore to a previous point if you have one available.
 
Well, you have two options then at this point:

a) Contact Toshiba and order recovery media
b) Find a friend that'll lend thier Vista DVD to you, but use YOUR product key for the installation which should be on a sticker located on the computer.

You might also want to try xcopy (xcopy /?) in command prompt for command assistance) to see if you can get your data to another drive before you re-install everything or it'll be lost. Use the command prompt from the recovery disc to do this.
 
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