Help me sort my laptop!

[tedmich]

As Elipsey has pointed out, the computer has a BIOS assigned boot order, its where the BIOS looks to find a working OS to allow it to boot. Back in the day many BIOS would actually look first for a floppy drive, and only after it found none would it look to boot from the HD. It should be pretty straightforward to tell the BIOS to have a boot order of HD (1) optical drive (2) and maybe USB (3). It will then start a bit faster too.

[Sea Chief]

Congrats SC!

IMHO every OEM HD (especially laptops) should be replaced before they are 3 yrs old or you risk a catastrophic failure and complete OS rebuild like this.

A typical 2.5" drive head will travel about 20k miles with 1h of use daily for 3 yrs, it gets TIRED.

thanks/ Im feeling rather pleased with myself tbh.. a helluva lot of work & time spent.

3 years?! this 10Gb XP dell d600 Im on right here.. is 12 years old! it cost me £75 and its far better quality: its made in Ireland (not china), it runs like clockwork, its in a far better 4:3 format so you can read text without ever squinting at some diddy type on a webpage like you do on these absolutley stupid widescreen ones, & it doesnt have a stupid reflective screen. Its 1/10th of the capacity, but 100% better. I wouldn't swap it in a month of sundays for the toshiba, or any similar 250Gb modern one. 3 years my hairy arse! hehe.

thx chaps.

[Dave H]

Why will no one believe me??

I believed you I thought it was the boot order after I googled that PXE thingy.

I wonder if the numpty at the computer shop changed the boot order when he was diagnosing the HDD 'failure'?

SC if your Toshiba is like mine I can show you how to change the boot order or you could change the power options so that closing the lid or pressing the power button puts it in 'hibernate' rather than 'shutdown' then it won't be booting up every time and you'll get to Windows a lot quicker. That's what I do. I only re-boot it if it's acting funny. And you won't need a hour to tiptoe through the BIOS it should only take a few minutes (famous last words?)