Toshiba Laptop will not see Recovery DVD? (1 Viewer)

[Wes]

Working on my Friends Toshiba Laptop and wanting to do a complete restore I put in the Toshiba recover DVD and the laptop will not even see it. I took the disc home to my PC and it sees eveything on the disc. The Laptop shows nothing on the disc when you look at drive "D" nor will it boot to it.

She has got loads of garbage on the HDD and it runs real slow so any idea as to how I can get this to reinstall the original OS so I don't have to spend hours doing clean up work?

Wes

 

[Paul Padilla]

1. Most restore CDs overwrite everything so make sure you back up any data if you don't want to drop the word friend from "Friend's laptop"

2. Will the laptop recognize other CDs? If not...

3. It could be that the garbage you refer to is making the computer run in 16 bit mode which can disable access to the CD. I also could be that the CD drive is dirty or has simply failed.

4. Since you've tried to boot from the CD already, make sure you check the BIOS settings so that the CD is first in the boot order.

 

[CRyan]

DVD. Does the drive read CD's? It is fairly common for cheap laptop drives to stop reading DVD's but continue to read CD's. So two options:

1. Put in a new drive.
2. Copy the backup portion of the DVD onto a Cd and boot from that.

 

[Wes]

The drive plays DVD movies and CD rom discs. The restore disc is a DVD.

How do you transfer the DVD to CD rom? it will make several CD's so will it boot fine and tell you when to change cd's. It sounds a bit risky!

I could try updating the DVDrom firmware perhaps it just needs a kick.

Wes

 

[CRyan]

Weird that it plays movies but not data DVD's? Is the disc scratched?

Anyway, my susggestion for putting it on CD would require you to pick and choose what contents are needed to do a basic recovery without all the crap onto one CD. This all depends on how Toshiba presses their recovery DVD. If they use Ghost or something like that then you are stuck. But then again, have you checked to see how much data is actually on the dvd?