Refurbing a Toshiba A45-S150

My friend asked me to fix his laptop as it seemed to have a virus on it. Well after a boot I found not only virus trouble, but lots of out-dated, useless software (mostly AOL crap that I know is painful to get rid of). He said I could do whatever was needed, so I decided the easiest path would be to reformat with Puppy using gparted and then perform a reinstallation. I decided to partition the HD to allow installation of XP (ntfs) and linux (ext3) so after doing this with gparted, I proceeded to install an old copy of XP I obtained. It had a license key with it that was supposed to work :) but alas I have had to find a workaround.

A bigger problem with this job was losing all the toshiba drivers including those that run the network adapter. I spent a few minutes searching and finally came across this forum thread:


http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/

Which pointed me here:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/

This was critical as I was S.O.L. with most of the hardware on this machine without these!

So now I just need to get any other drivers deemed useful, deal with the activation, SP2 and SP3 upgrades, WGA issues and all that jazz. (yes windoze is a pain).

After the couple hours needed for all that, I'll take 30 min. to do a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid lynx) install just in case the other system goes to shit!

p.s. I figd out activation (FFX Madman), however it may have interfered with installation of MSOffice 2007.

Puppy Rescues Windows

At a family get-together, I was recently asked by a war veteran who saw me tinkering with my hp pavilion laptop whether or not I knew "how to fix them things?" I asked what his problem was and he noted the last time he tried to boot his laptop it wouldn't start. His was also an hp pavilion. I told him to drop it off and I would see what I could do.

Upon initial investigation I found that the laptop would POST and the XP logo appeared as the OS began start-up, but then it suddenly would reboot...just as he indicated. So I decided to boot up Puppy Linux and see if I could access his hdd. I found I needed to boot with puppy pfix=ram (or something like that) since the Puppy startup script would hang when searching for the pup_save.sfs file. This was the first indication of a problem with the hdd. Once booted, I clicked the sda1 icon at the bottom left of the desktop and found (after futzing things up and a few reboots due to impatience) after about 120 seconds an error box indicates a problem with the drive and then after (no exaggeration) 20 minutes the ROX window finally opened and displayed the contents of the drive. After this initial wait, it took a mere 2 to 5 minutes for subsequent directories to open. It seemed as if the drive was spinning at only 10x or so.

Only 3 or 4 hours later (yes I was working on other stuff also) I had transferred the files that the owner cared to save to my external hd and started the reformatting and installation of my copy of XP. An hour after that I had XP installed and later at home I finished up with transferring his important data back. Success!