Toshiba laptop

verb8um

A friend of mine asked me to look at her laptop. (once they get wind of your schooling aspirations, look out......good practice tho)

Whenever it tries to boot, the first thing that comes up says "IDE #0 ERROR" "insert system disk". I've tried the companion disk that comes with it but can't get anywhere. C drive not recognized. Any suggestions?

Thanks

cheeblie

My guess is either the hard drive has crashed or the controller no longer works. I would imagine it's the first one, as a failing controller is much less likely. Just get the drive replaced with another one and she should be fine.

Cheeblie

RussS

Another thing to look for is the drive partitions. I seen one recently that had an old DOS virus from way back that actually ran a bogus fdisk on the drive. When I used fdisk it showed a non DOS partition - kind of weird because the girl was running W98 on it. Did the usual fdisk MBR - fdisk delete - fdisk create - format etc and it is still going strong

nethersdenizen

I knew someone with a toshiba libretto that this happend to. The thing would start and say IDE controller error and couldn't get any access to the C: drive. It was sent to toshiba and they 'repaired' the IDE controller and upgraded his harddrive free of charge....

After I thought about it for a minute there was nothing wrong with the Laptop, just the hard drive...it's an IDE and the controller is built into the drive because it's Intergraded and that's why they upgraded the drive because they didn't have the older one that shipped with it.

Cost about 300 dollars for that drive and work, about 100 for the drive and the crazy price those people charge for laptop work. Try to change out the harddrive and see what happens, if you have another laptop around you can borrow it out of there. Chances are it's in some sort of container that lets it be removeable or if it's a super small one like a the libretto was it might be bigger job of taking the thing apart.