Cannot boot to HDD without a disk in the tray. Help!

[pipedrone]

First time poster here.

I am trying to do a favor for my boss and fix his son's Toshiba Satellite L635-S3030 (2011). He got a nasty virus and my boss tried to re-format but was unable to install the correct drivers. Also the BIOS attempts a network boot even though network boot is the last in the boot order list.

He gave it to me to look at and I managed to get the OS to boot from HD with a windows disk in the tray. It won't boot to HDD without a disk in the tray.

I got suspicious though and tried it with a blank disk, and lo & behold it still works.

I currently have the hard disk removed from the machine and have docked it for analyzing/testing reasons.


Any ideas? :sarc:

btw I managed to get most of the drivers installed...the issue still persists.

 

[pipedrone]

Tried to use Toshiba's BIOS update utility to see if that would fix it and now the unit doesn't boot to the windows screen at all. I am able to still access the BIOS setup menu though and I found a strange setting.

Why does it say CDDVDW for the HDD/SSD?