I have a neighbors laptop (Toshiba Satellite, Win7, i5) that was left in a car in very cold temperatures which resulted in condensation on the hard drive...so she says.
Now it will not boot up. Boots to a black screen with a cursor and then just a black screen.
I've backed up her important data. Ran a repair while connected to my computer...no help.
Booted to a Win7 disc and ran a Startup Repair...no help.
Booted to disc and ran System Restore twice, with different dates and still no help.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
I just noticed out of the corner of my eye, it rebooted by itself and back to the same screen it stops on.
P.S. pressing F8 does not present any boot options.
Windows 7
Last Comment
philw3995
8/22/2022 - Mon
Tony Giangreco
First, somene must have mentioned to her about condensation of the hard drive. All hard drives are vacume sealed. Unless someone opened it and broke the seal (very unlikely), there wouldn't be any condensation in the HD.
It sounfs like her boot sector took a hit. Since you already backed up her data, the nest solution is probably a clean reinstall.
Lior Karasenti
You can try this workaround as a last option
Its a bit risky and will not work in 100%
1. delete bootcat.cashe from C:\windows\system32\codeintegrity\. on broken pc.
the file is 384 bytes when broken , is 2,344,056 when OK. is beeing recreated when booting.
2. copy from a ok pc c:\windows\system32\catroot\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}\ to broken pc.
3. restart.
Or if you backed up all the data you can just format and re install the OS
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I am suspecting that there is some hardware issues which needs to diagnosed first before going to OS options.
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William Peck
Tony Giangreco
Is there a diagnostic partition the system allows you to boot into to run Toshiba diags? I know Dell includes one on all their systems.
philw3995
ASKER
Thank you for all of the great suggestions!!! I'll be working on that computer tonight and will get back to you asap.
Scott Thompson
Here's a great website on how to fix the bootloader.
The only two options that matter when running externally is 'Boot Sectors' and 'Detect TDLFS File System'. You can select these by clicking on 'Change parameters'.
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philw3995
ASKER
Changed Hard Drive from AHCI to Compatibility Mode and it worked. Also had ran windows system restore which completed successfully but think the Hard Drive setting was the fix.
Thank you all, especially rindi
Tony Giangreco
Glad we could help.
philw3995
ASKER
This was the solution: "It is also possible your BIOS settings changed from IDE mode to to SATA or AHCI mode, so check if there are any such settings and play around with them."
I changed the setting from AHCI to Compatibility.
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It sounfs like her boot sector took a hit. Since you already backed up her data, the nest solution is probably a clean reinstall.