Booting Problems

[mrhohoha]

Hi people
I bought a new Toshiba Satellite L15-S104 laptop about a month ago, on the 15th of April to be precise, from America (I live in Birmingham, UK). It was working problem free till about a few days ago.
The first symptom I saw was the abnormal and sudden shutting down and restarting of the computer. This was further heightened by the blue screen 'Machine_Check_Exception'. Somehow, I got into Safe Mode and restored the system.
It worked fine for a couple of days, but then yesterday, I was downloading a file and I left it and went out. When I came back after about half an hour, the system had rebooted, but it was stuck on the boot screen, saying 'Toshiba - in touch with tomorrow', and it was totally frozen.
I manually switched off, and rebooted it, but the same boot screen came up and froze. I tried pressing F2 to get into the system BIOS, but it said 'Please wait...' and froze. Since then, I have tried putting in the recovery CD. taking out the RAM and putting it in a different slot, and pressing various buttons, but of no avail. I rang up Toshiba, but even they were at loss. they did offer to collect and repair it free of charge, but as im leaving for india this saturday, thats not an option for me

I have kind of narrowed down the possibilities to
1. either the RAM has suffered a static charge of some sort, as I took it out a while ago, and thats why it freezes.
2. the hard drive is faulty. when the system boots, it makes a small click, and then just stops. i hardly ever move it, so it shouldnt be a hardware problem.
3. the ROM/BIOS has some kind of problem, corruption

i am going to try and remove the hard drive, to see if it at fault at all. i've also ordered a stick of RAM to see if thats at fault. in the meanwhile, it would be helpful if u guys had any ideas on this?

my laptop spec is
TOSHIBA SATELLITE L15-S104
Intel Celeron M 1.3GHz
256MB PC2700 DDR 333MHz RAM
Toshiba M series HDD - 40GB at 4200rpm
Intel Extreme Graphics (integrated) - 64MB of shared video RAM
Windows XP Home Edition

Help!!

[Cyrix_2k]

I'm curious to know what happens without the HDD. My laptop (Gateway Solo 1450 w/1.3ghz celly, 256mb ram, 40gb/20gb Toshiba HDD) does the same thing sometimes. I just let it sit a while and it usually fixes itself.

[BUBBLE]

well it can be a heating problem also. And u may can have a full format and see how is the hard disk condtion. If it keeps on formatting for a long time that means there might be a problem in teh hdd unit itself. Adn just check with the us web site for any bios release nd any known problems by them nd the soultions they have offered. U can visit teh www.pc.toshiba-asia.com u can find some info also. Instead L15 just check for L10 cause in us machine they but number 5 in their models. I'll try to provide more info if I can get into.

[David]

Hi, welcome to the forums :welcome:

It sounds like some sort of BIOS problem if it is freezing at the boot screen. Is there any sort of reset BIOS button on the laptop at all? Apart from that I'm not sure what the problem could be. Any signs of physical damage from shipping?

[mrhohoha]

hi guys

well..thanks for the attention to this thread. i received my new DDR RAm chip today, and put it in. So I think I can easily eliminate the conclusion that the RAM is at fault. I put the new chip in but the same thing happens. I also tried putting in both chips, but of no avail. I haven't been able to remove the hard drive for such an idiotic reason that you people will laugh at me...i don't have a small/thin enough screwdriver, but I shouldn't think the hard drive is at fault, for the simple reason that I always booted and shut down the system properly, and the system had suffered no physical drops or shocks. In addition to that I also scanned my system for viruses regularly using Norton Antivirus 2005 which I received with the system.

I am going to India on Saaturday, so I could not get it picked up and fixed by Toshiba instead. It looks like they'll just have to do something about it there itself. The main possibility now appears to be corruption/shorting of the system ROM/BIOS. The HDD better not be as I have some extremely important work on there. So, in the meanwhile, I'll just try looking for a bigger screwdriver, or hope for the best.
If you guys have any other suggestions or diagnosis, please post them on here.

Thanks
hohoha