Toshiba Equium U400. Won't boot.

Terry

Vista home premium.

It wasn't starting up, so I did a restore from the HHD image.
That all went well. Restarted. Got the Please wait while windows configures your system message.
Half an hour of blank screen later the cursor appeared. Then I got the following error message:

Setup.exe - Application Error.

The Application failed to initialise properly. (0x0000006)
Click Ok to terminate the program.

I don't have the original OS disc. It didn't come with the lap top.

Any ideas?

Oh yeah, after clicking ok, I'm left with the circular cursor spinning on the vista background.
Also, tried to install XP on it, but it spit the disc back out and laughed at me. Said there was no HDD.

Terry

Ok. While doing the reinstall thingy again, I got a bit further.
First off it told me that it can't find HDD1. Then it went through the motions.
Restarted and this time the following error arose:

Install windows
Windows setup encountered an internal error while loading or searching for an unattended file.

The only thing I can think of is to throw in a new HDD.
Can anyone recommend a place to buy a good one?

Tom Dunne

Terry wrote: »

The only thing I can think of is to throw in a new HDD.
Can anyone recommend a place to buy a good one?

A couple of things I would try first, Terence.

Firstly, when the system boots up, is there any kind of menu system? If there is, see if you can perform any hard-drive tests to see if your HDD really is buggered. It may just be a case of the boot sector is knackered.

If that is the case, then you should be able to borrow a Windows Vista CD from a kind soul here on Boards.ie and re-install it. I don't have access to one, but I am sure somebody will.

Also try looking in the BIOS for some kind of disk-checker.

If your HDD is knackered, I just bought one today from Elara - http://www.elara.ie - they deliver, or you can nip over to ParkWest near Clondalkin and pick it up.

Terry

I'm half way through installing ubuntu on it at the moment.

I know very little about linux, so I'm just winging it here. It seems to be going ok so far though.

Terry

Well Ubuntu installed successfully, so I have no idea what the problem is with vista.

I'm gonna try XP again.
It's not my laptop. It's my cousins and they only use it for browsing. They won't care whether XP or vista is on it. They just want it to work.
Ubuntu would be too advanced for them though.

Terry

Got it going.
Two installs of Ubuntu (the first didn't take) and I was able to format the HDD.
Took three attempts at installing XP after that, but I stuck at it and am at the installing updates stage.

Now to find the drivers.

Terry

Back to the start.
I finally had XP installed and running properly.
I then did the updates thing and went through the motions.
Then while I was installing drivers, the laptop kept crashing.

There was three drivers which kept coming up at startup.
Two were audio and one was for the phone/fax modem.
As soon as I clicked cancel on the auto installation of the two audio ones, the phone one would pop up and then the laptop crashed.

I tried disabling the modem in the device manager, but it crashed again before I had a chance.

My thinking was that one of the updates was causing this crash (I've had trouble with windows search in the past), so I decided on a fresh install. The reason being that I didn't have time to do anything before it crashed. It worked fine just lying idle though.
Once again XP is telling me that there is no HDD, but Ubuntu is installing fine.
Now, when I say it's installing fine, this is only when I use the whole HDD and not partition it.
Part of this problem is on my end as I don't know what name to put on the partition (every time I try, it tells me I'm doing something wrong with the name (/something/somethingelse)).
The auto partition thingy won't work either though. Using half of the HDD for example.