[U60n0]

I recently received an old Toshiba laptop from someone who didn't want it anymore. They said that it didn't work and they had no use for it. I got it home, turned it on, and the Toshiba logo flashed on, but then it just went to this black screen with a blinking white underscore in the top left corner. I have found that this is quite a common occurrence while scouring forums, but most people's solution involves using a recovery disc, or reformatting the hard drive. I have no problem with doing that, but the laptop does. It will not boot from any CD that I have tried (I tried the recovery disc for it and a Windows XP disc), it just goes to the Toshiba logo and then to the blinking underscore. There is only one option available to push when the Toshiba logo flashes, and that is to "Press F2 to Change Boot Order". There is no option to access the BIOS at all, which pisses me off quite a bit. When I push F2, it gives a list of possible bootable devices like this:

Select boot device
[C]: CD-ROM
[N]: Network (LAN)
[F]: FDD
[B]: Built-in HDD
[D]: Default SYSTEM SETUP Device
Press [C], [N], [F], [B], or [D].

but no matter which key I press (or whether I have an actual bootable CD in or not) it does absolutely nothing unless I press Ctrl+Alt+Del, which automatically resets it to the black screen with the blinking underscore

I have completely disassembled and reassembled the laptop twice, and it still acts the same

All I know about it is that it is a Toshiba Satellite, it had no model number on it, but the recovery disc that I got with it says that it is for the Satellite 2800/2805 series (but it could be any number of models), and it has a product code sticker on the bottom for Windows Millennium Edition

All I really wanted to do was put XP on it and have it function as a crappy, low-level laptop for writing. Can anyone help me?

Edited by U60n0, 07 March 2009 - 07:50 PM.

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UPDATE:

I recently tried a method I heard about. I took out the hard drive and tried booting it. It then asked me to insert a system disc, at which point recovery discs do work, but it will not recognize the hard drive if I put it in, so I believe that the hard drive is bad.

[U60n0]

UPDATE:

I recently tried a method I heard about. I took out the hard drive and tried booting it. It then asked me to insert a system disc, at which point recovery discs do work, but it will not recognize the hard drive if I put it in, so I believe that the hard drive is bad.