Monday, March 07, 2011

Toshiba A100 automatically restarts during system restore using recovery DVD

Yesterday, my housemate asked me to help him to recover his Toshiba A100 laptop back to out-of-box status. "Easy!" That's what I thought. Unfortunately, it was not that easy.

I got the Toshiba recovery DVD, inserted the computer, and started from CD/DVD. When a screen showed “Please wait”, the computer restarted. Maybe I did something wrong. So I searched the Internet and tried to find out how to recover the system, none worked: pressing "C" then turn on the computer; pressing numeric "0" then turn on the computer.

Luckily, I came across a post at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/608008, a guy mentioned it may work if you delete all the data on the hard disk. Why not give it a try? I used my XP installation cd to erase all the partitions on the hard disk and created a new partition, then quitted the installation. Next, started the laptop from the Toshiba recovery DVD. Everything worked fine now. After "Please wait" screen, another menu popped up, asked you to recover the system back to out-of-box status or erase the data on the disk.

Problem solved, followed by painful system update :(.

Regarding this strange problem, I suspected that Toshiba recovery software will check some files on the disk if there are data there. If the file it checks has corrupted, strange problems will appear.

No comments:

Post a Comment