A friend brought me her laptop because she was getting a "Insert System
Disk in Drive" message on every boot.

I booted and went into the System Setup. The drive was not listed as
installed.

This laptop is rarely used. It probably has less than 50 hours of up
time on it. I, of course, suspected HD failure, so I brought it to the
office and borrowed a drive out of another laptop. That drive DID show
up in the System Setup, and it attempted to start, though it conitually
brought up the "Windows was shutdown unexpectedly" screen and attempted
to boot to safe mode. That let me know that it could see the HD
though.

I had them order a new HD and I installed it. The System Setup still
doesn't list the drive. Toshiba Recovery disk sees the new drive,
recognizes the partitions it creates and Ghost claims to be copying the
files to the HD, but the system still will not boot to the HD.

I suspect the onboard HD Controller, but the fact that it sees one
drive but not two others has got me perplexed.

Anyone seen this behavior before?

Steve

Check the master / slave / cable select jumpering of the drives.

No, I have not seen this problem, but I would have tested the drive in
another computer before ordering a replacement drive.


steventhomas42******.com wrote:
> A friend brought me her laptop because she was getting a "Insert System
> Disk in Drive" message on every boot.
>
> I booted and went into the System Setup. The drive was not listed as
> installed.
>
> This laptop is rarely used. It probably has less than 50 hours of up
> time on it. I, of course, suspected HD failure, so I brought it to the
> office and borrowed a drive out of another laptop. That drive DID show
> up in the System Setup, and it attempted to start, though it conitually
> brought up the "Windows was shutdown unexpectedly" screen and attempted
> to boot to safe mode. That let me know that it could see the HD
> though.
>
> I had them order a new HD and I installed it. The System Setup still
> doesn't list the drive. Toshiba Recovery disk sees the new drive,
> recognizes the partitions it creates and Ghost claims to be copying the
> files to the HD, but the system still will not boot to the HD.
>
> I suspect the onboard HD Controller, but the fact that it sees one
> drive but not two others has got me perplexed.
>
> Anyone seen this behavior before?
>
> Steve
>

steventhomas42******.com wrote:
> A friend brought me her laptop because she was getting a "Insert System
> Disk in Drive" message on every boot.
>
> I booted and went into the System Setup. The drive was not listed as
> installed.
>
> This laptop is rarely used. It probably has less than 50 hours of up
> time on it. I, of course, suspected HD failure, so I brought it to the
> office and borrowed a drive out of another laptop. That drive DID show
> up in the System Setup, and it attempted to start, though it conitually
> brought up the "Windows was shutdown unexpectedly" screen and attempted
> to boot to safe mode. That let me know that it could see the HD
> though.
>
> I had them order a new HD and I installed it. The System Setup still
> doesn't list the drive. Toshiba Recovery disk sees the new drive,
> recognizes the partitions it creates and Ghost claims to be copying the
> files to the HD, but the system still will not boot to the HD.
>
> I suspect the onboard HD Controller, but the fact that it sees one
> drive but not two others has got me perplexed.
>
> Anyone seen this behavior before?
>
> Steve
>

Boot to BIOS Setup and see what it says about the new drive. Sometimes,
one must reset the option to Automatic, etc., for the new drive to be
recognized. It's a long shot.

Q

Toshiba laptops have no options. It's totally automatic detection, period.


Quaoar wrote:

>
> Boot to BIOS Setup and see what it says about the new drive. Sometimes,
> one must reset the option to Automatic, etc., for the new drive to be
> recognized. It's a long shot.
>
> Q

steventhomas42******.com wrote:
> A friend brought me her laptop because she was getting a "Insert System
> Disk in Drive" message on every boot.
>
> I booted and went into the System Setup. The drive was not listed as
> installed.
>
> This laptop is rarely used. It probably has less than 50 hours of up
> time on it. I, of course, suspected HD failure, so I brought it to the
> office and borrowed a drive out of another laptop. That drive DID show
> up in the System Setup, and it attempted to start, though it conitually
> brought up the "Windows was shutdown unexpectedly" screen and attempted
> to boot to safe mode. That let me know that it could see the HD
> though.
>
> I had them order a new HD and I installed it. The System Setup still
> doesn't list the drive. Toshiba Recovery disk sees the new drive,
> recognizes the partitions it creates and Ghost claims to be copying the
> files to the HD, but the system still will not boot to the HD.
>
> I suspect the onboard HD Controller, but the fact that it sees one
> drive but not two others has got me perplexed.
>
> Anyone seen this behavior before?
>
> Steve
>

Hi Steven,

This is going to sound weird, but it sounds like a system board
overheating problem.

I think what I would do is run the install with the drive that
'seems' to work . . . shut it down and let it cool down for a couple
of hours. Then try and boot. If it does boot, then you probably are
facing an overheating problem. What you would do about it I'm not
sure since it may be as simple as an airflow problem or as
problematic as a seized or burned out cooling fan.

Overheating can be weird since it is not necessarily consistent and
can cause any number of malfunctions that may effect the same device.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"When hope is lost . . . the spirit dies."
-- Lao Tzu

http://blog.tlerma.com/