I have a Toshiba Satellite A45 laptop, I have had it for almost a year and I lost the recovery disk that came with it. It costs $75.00 US dollars to get the disk from the manufacturer. Well I don't ave 75 bucks for that. So I tried to boot from cd-rom with a retail version of XP Pro but for some reason everytime I try to boot from cd-rom it takes me to Caldera DR-DOS. I went into setup or CMOS to make sure I had it set to boot from the cd-rom and I did, so there was no mistake there. So now I have no clue how I can remove XP and reinstall a fresh copy and then reinstall all the drivers myself. Oh and it doesn't have a floppy drive. If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it or if you know where I can get the recovery disk for less than 75 bucks! Thanks in advance!
in your bios make sure that the boot up sequence has the CD drive first. then when you insert your XP disk and your computer boots up it should say "hit anykey to boot from CD" or something like that. press anykey, then a blue screen will popup. it will take a few minutes to load, then you have options to install windows. be sure to select a "fresh" install, not repair, and be sure to select the option to format the HD to get rid of your previous data.
When it takes you to Caldera DOS try typing in F-Disk and Delete all partitions in there. Then Create a new partition. Now exit out of Fdisk and then try booting up with your XP disk again.
In response to djscoop, that is how I always reformat computers that do not have the recovery disk, but in this case it does not ask you to press a key just takes you straight to caldera dr-dos. In response to bbmayo when i type in FDISK into teh dos screen in gives me 5 options. 1) create partition (2) delete partition (3) select bootable partition (4) re-write master boot record ( then the 5th option is esc= exit) it says to enter desired option but it will not accept any of the commands like trying to type the #2 where the ? mark and the blinking arrow are.
walnut try getting your hands on a win98 or 95 cd and see if you can boot from that? If you can then just go into the Win9X directory of the disk and then try the Fdisk..
You know what I had a toshiba Sattelite about 5 years ago and If I remember right there was something I had to do to that thing to reload it too... I'm going to look through my CD's and junk and see if I cant find something....
It would boot from Win 98, but not ANY of my XP disks. I tried the fdisk and I got it to delete the partition, then when I chose to create a new partition I got lost. There was no option what so ever to format in NTFS, it gave me 3 options: (1) bios partition (2) extended bios partition (3) fat 32 partition. So the only thing I could do was install Win98 and then use an XP disk to upgrade to XP. Still I am running in FAT 32 which I guess will be ok since I do not really use the laptop for much at all and nothing of any real importance is on it.
walnut, You can still change the drive over to NTFS How to convert a FAT volume or a FAT32 volume to NTFS Note Although the chance of corruption or data loss during the conversion is minimal, we recommend that you perform a backup of the data on the volume that you want to convert before you start the conversion. To convert an existing FAT or FAT32 volume to NTFS, follow these steps: 1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. 2. At the command prompt, type the following, where drive letter is the drive that you want to convert: convert drive letter: /fs:ntfs For example, type the following command to convert drive E to NTFS: convert e: /fs:ntfs Note: If the operating system is on the drive that you are converting, you will be prompted to schedule the task when you restart the computer because the conversion cannot be completed while the operating system is running. When you are prompted, click YES. 3. When you receive the following message at the command prompt, type the volume label of the drive that you are converting, and then press ENTER: The type of the file system is FAT. Enter the current volume label for drive drive letter ..... 4. When the conversion to NTFS is complete, you receive the following error message at the command prompt: Conversion complete 5. Quit the command prompt. Good luck For future refference though when you were loading Xp you should have chose to do a clean install and then reformat the drive into NTFS. No big deal if it's working now for you though.. Glad to hear you got her workin Cheers
Well that was the problem I wanted to do a clean install but XP just would not boot up. But the more I have thought about it I believe the FAT32 is probablly more secure since most all computers are NTFS now the idiots who create viruses and spyware are exploiting NTFS, so I guess I can deal with FAT32. (I remember when you had no choice but to deal with fat32...oh well.) Thanks for your help though I really appreciate it and that last post was really helpful now I have learned something new, that I can still convert to NTFS if I wish. In your post it says: If I chose to convert what would I put when prompted for the volume label? The letter C?
Leave it blank if you didnt name your drive... Also NTFS is way more secure than FAT32 just thought you might want to know that. cheers
I have a Toshiba Satellite A45 S120. It stopped resumption from hibernation mode. It appears to resume, says it's loading the info, then the screen goes blank and nothing happens. I have to reboot XP. Everything else is working normally. Any help?
The problem was that I couldn't get it to boot from xp setup disk, i was reinstalling windows, but a guy off e-bay sent me a copy of his a45 recovery disk and that got it back to where i wanted it, but thanks anyways!
