On 11/03/2018 10:11, HB wrote:


(much snipped for brevity)

I think either I or Vanguard must be mistaken. He seems to be implying
that you were about to crunch the entire laptop with a sledge hammer,
whereas I think your other half meant just the hard drive, assuming it
was dead, did she not? This is a standard way of preventing personal
data being retrieved from binned HDs. Personally, I use a lump hammer
and a cold chisel on a concrete floor or step.

But is the HD really dead, or has it just got corrupted ...

On the back it just says Satellite followed by numbers. I don't know which
numbers would be relevant. This is the 1st number. C655D (or 0) S5063 system
unit.

I would suggest going to Toshiba's site and comparing what you have with
pictures of other models and their given designations one of which will
probably be close to the above. When dealing with problems or buying
spares, it is *nearly always important* to know exactly what it is that
you have.

What makes you think it's the battery since it worked fine without it as
long as it was plugged in? I had this same "going blank" with the blinking
"-" in the upper left hand corner before and they were desktops. I don't
remember the exact figures anymore but to fix them, according to the shops
where I lived at the time, wasn't worth what it would cost. An XP and a
Vista both went the same way.

Shops may be right in that it may not be commercially viable for them to
make certain types of repairs, or for you to pay them to do so, but
probably they also hope that they can persuade you to buy a replacement
from their stock, while some repairs, a new battery is a good example,
you can do yourself economically.

It wasn't dead when plugged in as info came up when I tapped F2 or F8 but
not safe mode. Nothing that showed was familiar to me. A repair tech would
know what the info meant but it was Chinese to me. So it didn't need a
battery to run. I hate to toss it because it's like new. No one liked it
because it was slow. I was hoping to do a system recovery but couldn't get
into safe mode. I don't know any other way to do a system restore or
recovery.

Most PCs can do some primitive diagnostics from the BIOS. The BIOS is
usually entered by pressing or holding down a particular key at a
particular stage in the boot process - favourites are Del, and
either F10 or one of the other function keys across the top of the
keyboard. Again, going on to Toshiba's site and identifying the model
number may help you find out which key is the magic one. Some laptops,
such as Dells, can even perform full diagnostic tests by pressing a
different magic key, IIRC F11, but my memory for such intermittently
used information is getting a little dodgy these days, and anyway you
have a Toshiba, not a Dell, so it's likely to be a different key, if
full diagnostics are available at all.

You may find this page on my site, useful - although when written I
mostly had desktops in mind, since writing it I've repaired some laptops
as well, and while the details may be different, the principles are
exactly the same:
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/PCHa...areFaults.html

In particular, either ...

If the laptop can boot from a USB stick, then download an Ubuntu or
other Linux distro - make sure you get a suitable one, 32-bit or
64-bit as appropriate - install it on a 2GB or larger USB stick,
depending on the size of the download, and see what messages Linux
generates as it tries to boot the PC. This may give you some useful
pointers to a hardware fault. If the PC boots from the stick, then you
should see your hard disk partition(s) as clickable icons down the left
hand side menu (in Ubuntu, other distros may be different, for example
the icons may be on the desktop). Try this and come back to us with a
description of what happens, particularly whether the PC boots at all,
whether Linux lets see your HD at all, and even the contents of it.

Or ...

If you can mount the HD in a desktop, do that and diagnose it from
there. If, as is likely with an old laptop, you have an IDE drive, you
would need a 2.5"-to-3.5" HD connector/convertor and attach the other
side of that to a spare IDE connector and power cable, whereas a SATA
drive can be attached directly to a standard SATA cable, but you may
need a convertor for the power cable - it all depends on the
particular combination of laptop HD and desktop motherboard and power
supply cables. Try this and do a chkdsk on the laptop's HD - you will
probably have to go into Disk Manager and give the laptop HD a drive
letter first.

Either way, you should be able to find out if the HD can be retrieved by
repartitioning and reinstalling, and the first should also suggest
whether and how much of the rest of the PC is functioning correctly.