[adams0423]

I'm trying to help a friend with a Toshiba Satellite A205-S5853 running Vista. The system will not boot in normal mode, safe mode (loads some of the drivers and then freezes), or Last Known Good (sits forever with the Vista splash screen with green bar moving around). Fortunately she has a "Recovery and Apps" disk, but it doesn't seem to work either. After going through a phase of copying some files it goes to a black screen with a white cursor.

What other tricks can I try? I was considering formatting the harddrive with another Windows disk (not the Toshiba one) and then putting the Toshiba disk back in to try to build. Would that be advisable?

Thanks!

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I had that laptop, my hard drive fried twice. All looked somewhat like your problem.

[Roman Pope]

I had that laptop, my hard drive fried twice. All looked somewhat like your problem.

[usasma]

The most common reason for this in XP was either a hard drive problem, or a video driver problem.
Since you can't get into Safe Mode, it's not likely to be a video problem.

With Vista, there's a lot of other things that can cause this - but the hard drive issue still holds true.
Try a bootable hard drive diagnostic to see if the hard drive is bad. More info here: http://usasma.vox.co...iagnostics.html