Computer Will Not Boot

[commo_soldier]

So, my wife's laptop (Toshiba M45 S165) stopped working a few months ago and I just now am getting around to fixing it; however, it is proving to be quite difficult. Here is what I have tried so far:

1. - Computer will not boot past the splash screen (In Touch with Tomorrow TOSHIBA), it completes about 80% then freezes. What I have done so far on this screen.

• Took out the battery and power cable. Hold the power button for about 30 seconds or so then plug in the power cable and turn it back on. Once this is done it will ~80% of the get past the splash screen; however once past the splash screen either there is a black screen with a blinking line in the upper left hand corner or a disk read error. If the disk read error I press CTRL ALT DEL and it freezes on the splash screen again.
• Pressed F2 (for Setup) - It will change from "Press [F2] for SETUP, Pres [F12] for boot device selection menu" to "Please Wait..." in the bottom left hand corner, occasionally just above the bottom bar with the progress bar will be a a bar about 1/4 of an inch thick and will have different colors appear. The few times F2 works and does not freeze one of two things happens #1) ~75% of the time I just get a black screen. #2) The rest of the time I get a screen that shows my BIOS and has information on my hard ware like (shadowed and such), but this screen is extremely difficult to get to. Once on it it tells me to press F2 for setup, however, this does not work and it just is frozen at this screen.
• Then whenever I press F12 for the boot device menu I get that little colorful bar that scolls across the entire width of the screen and it just freezes, I've never got this to work.
• I've tried swapping out the hard drives, re-inserting the memory, and having no disk, the recovery disk, and a windows disk inside the CD Rom drive and nothing changes.

Overall, it mostly freezes no matter what I do, but I get better success by holding the power button with everything unplugged then turning it on for everything (minus F12 which has never worked).

I have searched for a few days on tips for some of these problems and have found nothing, I would be very greatful if anyone has an ideas on how to get this laptop working again. Thanks in advance for you help, I will be back in about 90 minutes if any follow on details are needed.

-Dan

[BipolarBill]

Make sure that the cooling tract is free of dust. It may be overheating.

You should consider that the hard drive has simply died. It does happen. You can try downloading the Seagate Seatools ISO and making a bootable CD so that you can diagnose the hard drive. It's Seatools for DOS.

SeaTools Desktop Usage Instructions | Seagate

[commo_soldier]

I have checked the cooling tract and it is free of dust. As for the HD, I will try and test it, but I do not have anything I can run it or my other laptop HDs off of other than the computer that is not working and will not boot from cd's because I'm unable to change the boot sequence.