neighbour has an old toshiba laptop.... two problems are showing up 1. Intermittently on power on it will boot to a black screen -- sometime 2 or more restarts are required to get "bios" screen for bios access to appear. 2. When it does boot through bios screen it will start to load Win 7 and after perhaps a minute or so re-boot itself and start over again. (i have never seen it boot to black screen here). What i have tried.... 1. Attempted to reload Windows 7. a. system seems to boot fine from dvd and steps through setup for windows 7. i formated hdd during this process however when install gets to unpacking files etc it generally reboots itself . 2. Changed the hdd - system properly seems to recognize the new hdd 3. Updated BIOS to latest version i could find - ver 2.2 4. Cleared Cmos . 5. Reseated Processor. 6. Obviously cleaned inside of laptop while i had it apart as well. (wasnt really all that bad with dust etc.) Seems to boot and run ok from DVD..... have run Ubantu test disks - memory test.... ran for four hours with no system self reboot. It will not load linux from these disks however....system reboots system reboot seems to be happening when I/O to HDD is attempted. i have had a look through hardware here and google but cant find much relating to this problem any ideas anyone could suggest would be appreciated When bios screen does appear it is accessable and entries can be changed as desired.
all symptoms remain the same. battery only, battery & ac power or ac power only. doesnt matter which.
try 1 ram tick at time. try different sockets. i had a laptop that would work great in linux but win would do similar.. was ram or cpu, forgot which test other cpu.
dont think is the ram.....run linux ram test from dvd with no shut down... ran four hours no faults (ram is 2gb on one stick and i dont have any others compatible kicking around) I dont have another cpu to try..... this unit is kinda old (came with vista installed from what google sez) but was upped to win 7..... doubt that neighbour wants to spend any big bucks on it.... i know i wouldnt.... as i said b4......crash seems to be occurring when it trys to IO to hdd.....