I have a Toshiba M205-S809 tablet PC that is about 2½ years old. It recently was making a lot of noise and quite working suddenly. I suspected it was a bad hard drive so I replaced it and have had trouble loading the operating system from the Toshiba provided Recover CD. I understand this is a common problem for many users.

I have an approved Toshiba USB DVD external drive (PA3352U-1CD2 Rev. 344) that is supposed to be compatible with the PC for use with the Recovery CD, have updated the BIOS as recommended and still no luck getting the PC to read and load the recovery CD.

I called Toshiba and for a small fee worked with their online technical support and after 5 calls and different people have given up on them.

I began to think maybe there is something wrong with the PC or the new hard drive so with the same external DVD drive I loaded a copy of Windows XP. The PC works fine so there is not a problem with the PC, new hard drive, external drive or connections.

Now with the XP Operating system installed, when I install the DVD in the external drive, it reads the CD and loads the Toshiba Recovery window. I am then given two options, install applications and driver (which I can do) or restore the original default system install. When I try to do the later, the system warns me that all data will be erased on my hard drive (I accept) and then restarts the PC with the CD in the external drive. When the PC restarts, it tries to read from the CD and I get the following message (same error message before I loaded the windows XP on the hard drive):

PXE-61: Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel Boot Agent

Because it cannot read the DVD, it then goes to the hard drive and loads windows XP.

In my last call to Toshiba they suggested I bring it by your place to have a technician take a look…

Any ideas what might be going wrong?
Do you think the problem is possibly the CD itself?
Should I purchase a replacement recovery CD from Toshiba?

Any ideas you may have are appreciated.