installation or hardware, you decide...lol sorry if in wrong thread

[Techdude85]

Hello, wasn't really sure where to post this but...man.

Side note:this laptop was dropped or stepped on. ill explain in post.

So my buddy asked me to fix his toshiba and i have been having a great time. but sadly cannot get any operating system to load. Here follows the system specs, what ive done so far, and my main errors im receiving.
OS: windows 7 home premium bios version/date tosinv - insydeh20 version 1.50 12/15/09 system type x86 family 6 model 23 stepping 10 Proc: intel(r) core(tm)2 duo cpu t6500 @2.10 ghz MAIN PROBLEM HD: toshiba mk25555gsx

So i started off by using f8 to access windows boot command, would not run command prompt or repair.

So....I pulled out my personal windows 7 home premium disk to see if it would respond better to that repair menu or access the command prompt with the repair tools but everytime right before the installation menu it would hang up, similiar with the f8 command.

shortly after I received an error stating no valid devices are found and it would no longer read my windows 7 installation disk....system retry failed or something..

so I pulled out a box of old crap moved aside a yearbook and found an old windows 98 cd and precided to try cd booting with that which was a success.

so then i was messing with dos and deleted my partitions and fdisk exited right after...woops thought i would be able to recreate those parts....anyways it closed down and was no longer able to read the drive. prompting a> on start haha and a similiar system retry failed error "sys error cannot read disk"

so then i pulled out boot disk and recovered all personal data. then i went into diskpart and proceded to clean, which worked then clean all and it came up with this error message "DiskPART has encountered an error: The device is not connected."
Crud...
so i open up a drive diagnostic tool on my bootdisk and it reads the drive, it says the drive is working and 63% healthy....whatever that means
Then I decided well...if the drive is being read....then maybe if reset it to 0's it would reset it or something...lol....so i wiped the drive with a double pass and at 99% it said "error redundant cycle, do you want to retry or abort" so i hit retry and it finished.

so i was like hmmm ive only built towers...never really worked with laptops.
so i pop the keyboard secure stripping and start dismantling it. I dismantled the entire computer in about 15 minutes and couldnt find not one plug unplugged, broken chips. someone previously worked on the computer, and inside they left me a note....saying that the harddrive was previously replace which got me thinking that this is a common type of error. so i lifted the motherboard up, looked under it.....everything was looking beautiful.

I assembled the laptop, and it the damage was reduced greatly after resassembly. just under where it had been stepped on was the internal blower so...was like few...thats a relief

I took out the harddrive and popped it back in and made sure it was snug.

I booted with a bootdisk recovery program and checked the drive and its still reading the drive and saying its 63% healthy.

I have two ideas, one is that i need to update or flash the bios. or I need to find a driver for my harddrive, could it be the rom on the harddrive has been destroyed when i used dos?

I'm open to any suggestions, going to the toshiba website now to get the harddrive testing tool....if they have one.

If anything is not included in this post, i have no idea. but the major courses of action which i took are all listed.


also my bootdisk reads a drive X: and it has system32 files on it....could it be a password protected partition within the harddrive? i could delete those files....anyways i dunno

 

[Techdude85]

so i go to the toshiba website and they say there is a hidden partition on the drive...maybe im in the wrong forum now....darn lol so i just tried to check this x drive for errors and it says its write protected. usb ports on the laptop are failing...

 

[Dwarf]

Hi Techdude85 and welcome to W7 Forums

It sounds as though the HDD has failed or is failing (63% healthy).

Do you have a live version of Linux, such as Ubuntu, that you can try out? It doesn't need installation, thus you can eliminate the rest of the hardware. To prevent accidental writing to the HDD, remove it before trying the above.

 

[Techdude85]

well ubuntu might be a good option but im 99% sure its the harddrive and it has something to do with the deletion of the recovery and primary partition in dos, now the hidden partition is creating redundancy cycle errors as i tried to partition and format the drive.
well now im having trouble finding the proper hard drive diagnostics tool for this specific hard drive. i just loaded one and it said it only worked with service pack 1..whatever that means lol

 

[Techdude85]

"The UDMA utility is designed to change the transfer mode of Fujitsu's Branded Toshiba MPD, MPE, and MPF series hard disk drives to pre-set transfer rate for compatible operation. Some motherboards cannot run the drive properly at the detected transfer rate. Users who experience UDMA messages of intermittent failing upon starting the Operating System should run the appropriate UDMA utility."

you learn something new everyday i guess

 

[Dwarf]

That's why I suggested trying Ubuntu. As I stated above, it doesn't require installation to the HDD which, as both you and I suspect, is the root of the problem.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

While it's a pain to open up lappys, i'd simply take the HDD out and then connect it to a desktop computer that was already running (SATA drives are hot-swappable even without the dedicated hot-swap bays, just connect the cables and wait a bit).

Then nuke any partition and whatnot and then run diagnostics as needed.