Toshiba L355D-S7901 was bricked during a failed flash. I renamed the latest BIOS file to BIOS.fd and put it on a flash drive. I held down the Windows+B keys for a few seconds, plugged in the power, then held down the power button for a few seconds then let go of all three. Nothing happens. I repeated with the keys Fn+ESC and Fn+F with the same result. Tried different waiting times too. I tried an external USB floppy, the internal CD, and an external CD reader; none work. None of the devices ever spins or lights up (except the internal CD for a few seconds but it does that even with no disc). I confirmed the recovery filename should be BIOS.fd by dumping the fd file and looking at it with a hex editor. Any ideas?
How would a different BIOS version make any difference if the laptop never tries to read the medium? My problem is the key sequence or other tricks to get the process started.
i bought usb spi programmer from ebay since sometimes it cant be usb recovered by bios bootblock. use the same version that was originally in bios before bad flash brick... sometimes its the only way. on some toshibas theres a contact xxx or J1 or similar in the memory section (under the tape covering it sometimes) that might reset it to be able to start recovery.. remove hdd and dvd. as i pointed out with a dell D620 only would recover versions A02 or A04, not others
I desoldered the bios chip today and will put it into my universal device programmer (I have to make an adapter) to reflash it. I will post back my results in a couple of days.
To complete this thread - making the adapter for the chip to go into my programmer was going to be a big job and I was under the gun to finish this, so I ordered a new pre-programmed chip from ebay ($29), soldered it back on the board, and WAH-LAH, all is working again.
all u had to do is solder wires (ide ribbon cable works great) to the pins of the chip and put them on the programmer with proper pinouts