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M40 - Problems booting

post #1 of 9
10/1/05 at 2:12pm
Thread Starter 
I got an M40 less than 2 weeks ago and have started running into some problems with boothing it up. I have had 2 occasions where it loads the toshiba screen and then freezes on a black screen with only a cursor flashing in the top left hand corner. I end up havign to turn it off and on several times before it will begin loading windows. The most recent time this happened, even after it started to load windows it ended up going to the deadly blue screen and said it was dumping memory to disk.

Last week I installed an extra 512 mb of ram so I have a suspicion that this may be what is causing the issue. Is this the likely cause? The problem is that even if i just take out the ram it will be impossible to determine if the problem is fixed because it works fine almost all the time anyway. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks for the help!
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post #2 of 9
10/1/05 at 2:12pm
Thread Starter 

Boot problem - update

Just an update.... I haven't been able to boot my laptop since I posted the first message(currently on the desktop). I tried removing the ram I installed previously and still nothing. I'm starting to think this might be a hard drive issue since it doesn't seem to be able to do anything at all while it is acting up. Anyways, looks like its going to have to go back. Any thoughts/suggestions for me before I go back? Thanks.
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post #3 of 9
10/1/05 at 3:40pm
As you suggested, try removing the drive. A lot of times a BIOS will hang trying to recognize drives that have issues. Blue screens are also often the result of corrupt data. If you have an adapter you can try plugging it in to your computer's IDE chain and see if it can recognize it.
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post #4 of 9
10/1/05 at 4:01pm
Thread Starter 
I do not want to take out the drive as it is only 2 weeks old and dont want them to try telling me that I caused any issues there are. Could you provide some more info regarding your IDE chain comment? You lost me a little on that. Thanks.
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post #5 of 9
10/3/05 at 10:45pm
Usually on laptops there is a panel for easy access and removal of the HD, so it shouldn't be an issue of taking the notebook apart to take out the HD, I don't have an M40 available or I could tell you exactly where it is, then again if you feel like you don't know what you're doing it's probably best not to play with it.

The IDE chain is what your hard drives are plugged into on your PC, there are usually three headers on a ribbon cable, one for the motherboard, one for the master drive and one for a slave drive. That is your IDE chain. Problem is that regular PC drives are 40 pin and laptops have a smaller, 44 pin connector that provides power along with data, so you'd need an adapter.

I've just seen quite a few times in my line of work where the computer boots up, and has issues recognizing the hard drive, so it just sits there forever. If you remove the drive, you remove the problem and it boots up fine, gets past POST(the initial bootup screen), though since there's no drive you'll get some sort of error. At that point you'd know for sure that it's the drive or perhaps the IDE controller or IDE cable causing the problem.
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post #6 of 9
10/5/05 at 12:55am
I have the exact same problem. My laptop started after about 2 months after i bought it. if you find out what it is PLEASE let me know. I have reformatted 4 times after it started doing it each time and still that has not cured it.
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post #7 of 9
10/5/05 at 1:22pm
i had this problem , except of a flashing cursor it said windows/system some directory and it just wouldnt load, i reset it to safe mode, safe mode faield and resest automatically. then i just left it on until it loaded, i too have another brand of memory in there, could be that.
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post #8 of 9
10/9/05 at 10:26am
I had similar boot problem on my M40 (bought in June). Upgrading th BIOS using a floppy disk (you need an external floppy drive - download the recent BIOS upgrade from Toshiba support) helped solve the problem. For some unknown reason, BIOS upgrade from Windows did not help.
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post #9 of 9
10/15/05 at 6:23am
Thread Starter 
I never figured mine out... took it back and exchanged it. Now the new one has some issues with the screen. There are a few spots on it. I've had about enough with Futureshop now. I dont really feel as tho I should have to settle for a machine with a replaced screen when I payed for a new machine but the M40's are gone now and they will only exchange for the M70-SR3, which doesn't quite match the specs of my M40-SF3. The store manager is in tommorow so I will be having a chat with him on the issue.
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