For some reason, my girlfriend's Toshiba 1805-S207 has refused to boot from the CD drive. When I attempt to boot, all I get is a blank screen. I don't know if this is a problem with the CD-ROM or with the motherboard itself. My thought was that if I needed to recover the hard disk, I would have some serious problem because I can't boot from the CD.

After some investigation, I did discover a workaround.

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

Basically, I download sbminst.exe and run the command from the command line with a formatted blank floppy in your floppy drive.

sbminst -t us -d 0

(0 = floppy. Be real careful, I don't want you to overwrite your hard disk). This creates a boot floppy. It seems to erase your entire floppy, so be careful.

When it comes time to boot from the CD, insert the CD into the CD-ROM and the boot floppy into the floppy drive. When you switch on the Toshiba, press F12 immediately and select Floppy boot. You'll get a menu of drives. Click on the CD and it will boot from the CD-ROM.

Using this, I was able to boot from the Acronis TrueImage Recovery CD, something that I couldn't do before.

Not sure why this work and Bios boot does not

Paul