Look up the Toshiba model number underneath (normally on the sticker) and google the bootup button options on the manufacturers website. A lot of laptops have all diferent kinds of boot buttons i.e. shift+2, Alt+1, Esc, F2, F5, F8, Shift+e. press and hold power button for 3 sec, etc....
Then I get the blue screen saying blah blah blah.
And for some reason I have no restore points. I dont even know what thats all about.
1.You should have written down the BSOD error code. That could have told you if you've got hardware conflicts...and restore points are/is the system restore software in Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System restore. It can be easily disabled. Also a s*#t tin of viruses like to back themselves up in it, so it's a bit of a wager really, if you want to manually disable it or not... You could have tried that option if you could boot into safe mode...bugger
2. Boot from an Ubuntu, BartPe, Knoppix or Erdcommander CD. They all have system fix tools in em, which could fix your booting issues. With my favorite one: Erdcommader, you can boot into a virtual environment GUI (which looks like XP) and copy/paste all your data to an external drive and then format the corrupted HDD. Since it's a laptop you should have 2 CDs that came with it. One recovery and another original. Note: If you format your HDD, you can't use the recovery CD anymore because it is specifically for the recovery partition on the HDD (in most cases). Since you said the recovery partition is corrupted (which it might not necessarily be) you won't need it anymore anyway. There is a 50/50 chance however that the original CD will reinstall a recovery partion and a second XP partition. In this case you are lucky and can keep the recovery CD for future use. In some cases there is also just 1 CD...the recovery CD, which can format and rebuild your recovery partition and the second Xp partion. Google the laptop model number and look for information on the manufacturers website regarding the CDs and what they can do.
3. Get SpinRite and do an examine/fix on your HDD. It's a small boot file that you can burn onto CD and boot from, if ya don't have floppy. This won't fix screwed up files (i.e. won't fix your booting issues)! It will however fix damaged sectors on the HDD if there are any. That might let you do a proper "chkdsk c: r/ /f" fix then.
Open a cmd box and type "chkdsk /?" without the quotes for options if it confuses you.
4. Worst case scenario: Assuming the controller card in the HDD is not busted (which would pretty much render it inert), take the HDD out of the lappy and plug it into a PC tower (or external USB caddy), if you don't have the cable (the cable is a simple 2.5 to 3.5 IDE adapter and costs $5 at any computer shop). Then download "Getdataback" and install it in the PC. Run the program on the good HDD. Reboot if necessary to detect the external corrupted HDD. If it won't detect the external HDD, go get the adapter cable, that will work 100% (recovery takes up to 2 hours depending on HDD size). Then simply copy/paste the files off the corrupted HDD that have been recovered. It will recover 99% of your data from your lappies HDD. Trust me, I've done it a million times and it works the best.
Heres the link:
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
The demo version will only let you view the recovered files, so you'll need to pay for the serial or google the software some other way, if you know what I mean...
P.S. Theres a 10% chance if you use certain software as described in No.2 to recover your system, those system files could just be simply overwritten, which could reformat so to say, your registry hive or sys files so that certain GUI files like My Documents could be rewritten which would make all your files in that directory appear like they have vanished. They are not really gone, you can still recover them with recovery software. It's kinda like the rubbish bin on the desktop. You don't actually delete/overwite the files when you empty the rubbish bin, you just delete the link to them which makes it look like it has been deleted.
I'm going on holiday now and won't be back for another 7 weeks. I won't come back to this thread, so please don't ask me specifically any questions about the processes. I'm sure other ppl can confirm and help you out there if ya need help with this...sorry.
Best wishes, happy engineering
