Greetings,

I have two very serious problems on my Toshiba, Satellite M45 laptop running Win XP Home - SP3.

A) Problem one is being taken care of by Toshiba. The AC to DC transformer caox cable to the PC frayed open and shorted the power to the shield. Battery went dead, the insulation on the coax went on fire after much arcing and sparking.

B) I repaired the cable and verified the +15 Vdc to the PC and the +5 Vdc to the USB pin. However, when I tried to POST the laptop, it was stuck in the POST test and Windows start-up Mode.

I went into the Safe Mode, no change. Finally I took the OS out of "Auto Start on Error". The BSOD - is shown as a "Unmountable_Boot_device" and strongly suggests that the boot record on the hard disk is corrupted.

Do any of you, Seahawk, Scott happen to have a utility that will boot from a CD and re-write the boot record on the disk.

"Unmountable_Boot_device" also indicates a dead hard drive.

If you can boot to an XP CD and get to the recovery console (first recovery option) then there are a number of tools available.

FIXMBR and FIXBOOT would be good for a start.

They are detailed here: Recovery Console Commands

Ben,


I got my disk back.

The sequence was:

1) "F2" to change boot device.
2) FixBoot rewrite boot record
3) Fixmbr - to test fix
4) Chkdsk - I lost 1 sector.

But life is good, I did not loose any pictures.

Excellent news.