Toshiba Satellite P850 PSPKBA-03000U
HDD: Toshiba MQ01ABD075
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Hi, I'm unable to startup my computer, and am being stumped at every attempt I make to fix it. Here's what's happened so far:
- Upon startup, it gets past the Toshiba splash screen, then gets stuck on a black screen with a moveable cursor (but no other responsiveness), or gets stuck on the Windows welcome screen, and has once or twice immediately gone to a page reading "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".
- The same happens in safe mode.
- In BIOS, the HDD is still recognised... the majority of the time.
- I attempted to use Last Known Good Configuration, it got stuck on the Windows welcome screen.
- The "Repair my computer" option does not appear in the advanced boot options menu.
- I attempted to boot from a Windows System Repair disc made from my computer after it was bought, but it results in a Toshiba error screen "f3 f100 0003". There are suggestions online that this error is associated with a rootkit infection that can be removed by Kaspersky TDSSKiller. It could also be possible that this system repair disc has a write error; I am trying to get hold of another from someone else.
- I also attempted to boot from a System Repair disc made from a Windows 7 32-bit computer (forgetting that it was 32-bit). For whatever reason, this successfully loaded the System Recovery interface. Either due to being 32-bit or because of genuine errors, it was unable to recognise the existence of an operating system or C: drive, and as such System Restore cannot be performed, and the following:
- I attempted Startup Repair-
- "Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically"
Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 02: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 03: unknown
Problem Signature 04: 0
Problem Signature 05: unknown
Problem Signature 06: 1
Problem Signature 07: unknown
- "Diagnosis and repair details: Root cause found: A hard disk could not be found. If a hard disk is installed, it is not responding."
- In Command Prompt-
- diskpart> list disk: "There are no fixed disks to show."
- chkdsk /f /r /x: "The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected.
- C: did not appear in the file manager accessed through notepad
- I attempted to use Kaspersky Rescue Disk to scan and remove malware; it was unable to see C:. After being updated, it performs a scan lasting 1-2 seconds and finds nothing.
- I booted from the Linux Live CD 'System Rescue CD'. I'm not familiar with Linux and to me operating the various tools here seems less than easy to understand to me.
- However, in the file system checker 'fsarchiver probe simple', it is able to see my C: partition:
[DEVICE][FILESYS ][LABEL ][SIZE ][MAJ][MIN]
[loop0 ][squashfs][(unknown)][352.42MB][7 ][0 ]
[sda1 ][ntfs ][System ][1.46GB ][8 ][2 ]
[sda2 ][ntfs ][HDD ][685.13GB][8 ][1 ]
[sda3 ][ntfs ][Recovery ][12.04GB ][8 ][3 ]
Upon googling, apparently the initial loop0 partition is related to the live cd.
- It appears that in order to access or backup C: (sda2) I need to mount it; however in response to inputting "ntfs-3g -o ro /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows" into the command line terminal, I received:
"Error reading bootsector: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows..." etc.
So, I've more or less run into a brick wall at every turn so far. I'm not yet convinced that actual data on the C: partition is gone, or that the HDD is suffering hardware failure- so recovering my data is the first priority, and otherwise to repair the problem.
My current remaining options to fix it myself that I'm aware of are:
- Getting hold of another 64-bit system repair disc
- Try another Linux-based boot option, such as Ultimate Boot CD or Ubuntu Live
- Try another antivirus boot option
- Try to remove the rootkit (if there is one) with one of the latter two options above
I will continue trying to follow up these options, but any help would be extremely welcome!
(Further background:
- Laptop was bought four years ago; it has never previously had any major HDD issues. It had recently begun to overheat (though not to the extent of, say, switching itself off, or noticeably affecting performance)
- I had previously been backing up to an external that wasn't big enough for both full backup of files and a system image; and windows backup consistently failed to back up incrementally. I bought a new Seagate 2TB Expansion drive and got EaseUS Todo Backup Free, and told it to do a Disk backup (effectively a system image), where it said that there was an error on an unnamed partition (my HDD only had the main C: partition, and the two smaller system/recovery partitions, so presumably the error was on one of those). It said it could continue sector by sector to bypass that part, I had never experienced any issue relating to such an error before, and I just wanted to get a backup down ASAP, so I said yes, intended on investigating the error later set it to shutdown when down and went to bed. I woke up several hours later to see that the Seagate external was no longer blinking as it does when in operation, and therefore thought the backup had finished and the laptop should be shut down, but the lights were still on. Being half asleep, I held down the power button to hard reset for inexplicable reasons, and the computer has been unable to boot since.
- Either I was right and something strange was happening at the time related to the system/boot partition error above, that happened to occur whilst backing up; or I was wrong and I caused the problem by mistakenly doing a hard reset whilst the computer was on/possibly backing up system files.
- The backup that was created at this time was indeed incomplete and corrupt, leaving me high and dry.)
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