Toshiba P205-s6257 wont boot with Vista recovery disks after formatting drive

[alffy]

I have a P205-s6257 toshiba laptop that Im trying to load window 7 on with NO luck after I formated the hard drive. It actually gets worse, what happen to the good old days of formatting the drive then adding in the new OS, creating a partition and away you go

Anyway, this Toshiba laptop had Vista on it originally and I do have the recovery disks that came with the laptop but I cant seem to get the formatted hard drive to boot up either with the new windows 7 dvd nor the original vista recovery disks. ugh.

The error message im getting now is missing operating system. I tried click "F8" and "0" but it still say "missing operating ".

I have another laptop and a sata usb enclosure. is there anyway to format the drive via usb and add the toshiba recovery files needed to get my laptop to boot up again?

Any help would be approciated

Alffy
[email protected]

 

[etaf]

have a look at the boot order in the bios/setup
make sure the DVD is 1st in boot order

you should see how to get into bios/setup as the pc starts - F2 , F10 , Del Key

 

[alffy]

Hi etaf,

thanks for the reply, thats about the 1st thing i tried was f2 to get into bios and select the boot order. Basically from what i can tell it looks like my format drive software wiped out the extra partition toshiba uses for recovery of OS systems. I basically have a 150gig C partition at the moment with no other partitions.

The hard drive is good and the cd/dvd is good as well because i did a test last night by trying to see if any other boot dvd would work and i was able to at least get the windows xp sp3 dvd to boot and add this OS on this drive. That being said toshiba has NO drivers for me.

I am so disappointed with Toshiba at this point. I specifically purchased windows 7 to replace (the crappy Vista home premium I had on the laptop) and still want to do a "clean install" but i guess this quote secret partition that toshiba wants to see doesnt exist on my drive anymore.

Is there anyway to add the recovery data that toshiba provided me on the recovery dvds to the toshiba drive if i pull it out of the unit then use a USB enclosure and add those files to the drive somehow?

Thanks a bunch in advance,

alffy

 

[etaf]

do you have the original recovery DVDs - or did you create them when first installed the vista on the PC often at new they ask you to create the recovery dvds

do you know if the windows 7 are upgrade or full versions at all

 

[alffy]

Hi etaf,

yes, the recovery dvd's are the originals. and the windows 7 is an oem version 64 bit.

 

[etaf]

the recovery dvd's are the originals.

you could try putting the originals back on the PC - that will resinstall the hidden partition

 

[alffy]

hey etaf,

thanks for the input. should i just dump these files on to the drive and then execute the install.exe? just curious. see screen shot below.

 

[etaf]

no screen shot - not sure what you mean

 

[alffy]

hi etaf

sorry about the screen shot not showing up. well i tried what u said by adding the files to an external drive and try to boot off of that but i couldn't get it to work. i have the files loaded on the hard drive now to and asked toshiba as well for a bootless procedure and they said they know its possible to do this but would not offer advice.

Any other ideas?

thanks.

alffy

 

[etaf]

how to load a screen shot - see below

can you be more specific about "the files"

the vista CD should boot up - not sure what you mean by copied and files - can you explain further


To post a screen shot of the active window, hold the Alt key and press the PrtScn key. Open the Windows PAINT application and Paste the screen shot. You can then use PAINT to trim to suit, and save it as a JPG format file.
To upload it to the forum, open the full reply window and use the Manage Attachments button to upload it here.
Full details are here http://library.techguy.org/wiki/TSG_Posting_a_Screenshot