My toshiba satellite died, well maybe?

Question

I set the laptop on a table and started a defrag on the 250gb HDD. I fell asleep and when I woke I discovered that my girlfriend had accidentally pulled the ac adapter from the laptop. While the defrag was running, with no AC power, the battery ran down and the COMPUTER powered off. So basically the defrag screwed up the HDD. I assume because the defrag could not finish (no power) it screwed the MBR. Now the computer will not boot, keeps coming back as PXE-e61 media failure, since that is network boot, I am assuming HDD failure, bad HDD. I tried XP install, no luck could not write to drive, tried Vista, won't get past "hit enter to install" (keyboard will not work) I know keyboard is not bad as it works when it gets to certain points in XP. I guess since HDD is not working, keyboard can't function. I tired flash BIOS nothing. Keyboard will not work, sometimes I can get f2 to open Bios, but keyboard will not work in that either. I plan on putting in a new HDD, but I am wondering if anyone has had any experience with a HDD doing this. I am thinking I could put the HDD in an External enclosure or HDD dock and maybe fix it by trying to format it using my desktop. Any ideas?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Connect it to an IDE/SATA to USB Adaper (google "BT-300 topmicrousa"). Right click, format. Repeat your reinstallation process and you're done.

I use it all the time and trust me, it works. Since you can't reformat it, you just need to format and then reinstall rather than the completely process of reformatting.

Best of luck.

Anonymous · Answer

firstly its not a toshiba,,, they were made by PC world, and used a few toshiba components...

that aside... heres what i do...
 you need a programme called easus photo recovery... (we'll get to why in a moment)

put your HD into a caddy and set it to slave. 
virus check it, with avira. 

when it comes back cleared... format the drive. remove the partitions, create new partition, adn reinstall XP... this takes about 45 mins, then, install the MB drivers, 

and before you do anything else, install easus, and get it to search for everything which you just deleted... i have a 1.5tb backup drive, and a 1tb main HDD...you cannot recover and write to the same drive... so put it all on the other... it takes around 4hours to TOTALLY recover and rebuild the formatted drive, and another 4hours to reconstruct the data... 

yes, its a bit of messing around, but, i lost a whole years worth of images, im a photographer, and i was gobsmacked... i tried everything... most of it didnt even find all the images, let along the music and the work files.. Easus recovered 900 gigabytes.... off a 1tb drive...  

and, easus is free... gofo the 211 version, its got no shareware adverts or buy it now nag screen.

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My toshiba satellite died, well maybe?

2 Answers