My friend's Nan has a laptop, a Toshiba Satellite P25. Whenever she booted up, S.M.A.R.T. would say "immediate hard drive failure imminent, back-up your data, yada yada". When she booted into Windows Home, she would see her desktop wallpaper, but Windows would never load. So I booted in Safe Mode, grabbed all of her pics and music onto a usb drive, and ordered a new hard drive from e-bay. The new hard drive arrived, I put it into the laptop, and when I power up, I get 3-3-1 beeps and nothing on the screen. If I get nothing on the screen, is that a video problem? Did I mess something up putting in the new hard drive? Or is the BIOS looking for Toshiba on the hard drive? If so, how do I reset the BIOS?
WOW! does your laptop actually says "yada yada" in the message?! This sounds like a damaged Motherboard. Or proprietary hardware (HDD). Did you try putting the original HDD? Does that work? When you say, Windows Home... can you PLEASE be presice: - Windows XP Home - Windows XP Home SP1 - Windows XP Home SP2 - Windows XP Home SP3 - Windows Vista Home Basic - Windows Vista Home Basic SP1 - Windows Vista Home Premium - Windows Vista Home Premium SP1
In the past, Toshiba has used very custom BIOS software for their laptops because the hardware platform is pretty static. It may be possible it and the new drive are not agreeing. Was the drive in a caddy, or did you have to take the system apart to replace it? If you had to disassemble anything, double check all the connections to make sure they are seated properly. Otherwise, what happens when you don't have any hard drive connected?
Actually, I kind of fieel like an idiot. I just reseated the memory and it worked again! The only problem is that she has the serial for XP Home under the laptop on a sticker, but not disk. She doesn't have the recovery disks either. I guess it wouldn't help anyway, since it's a complete new hard drive. I just have to ask around if anyone has XP Home.