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I recently tried to restore my computer to factory condition because it was freezing up periodically and after waiting for about an hour or two for it to "finish", I'm informed that it failed. It then prompted me to shut down and I did. I went to sleep because with how long it took to get that far, it was already midnight.

When I awoke this morning, I tried to start it up, and it went back to the repair screen. Now it says initializing partition and has for the last half hour. I'm pretty sure it's not going to do anything. I don't have a recovery disc and I don't want to hard restart it because I don't want it to get even more screwed up.

Are there any options besides sending it to get fixed and waiting weeks? Someone actually suggested that to me previously as if I were asking on here not for possible home solutions but for steps on asking technicians. This is supposed to be an alternative to that

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if a factory restore fails too, getting it fixed professionally is your best bet, honestly. – Journeyman Geek Apr 28 '11 at 16:28
Okay so you're trying to basically reformat your HDD and re-install the operating system? Have you tried booting off your boot disk again? Probably one of the best bets. Is your boot disk a CD or USB drive? This may affect how the operating system internally numbers drives. Is this Windows? What version? – PP. Apr 28 '11 at 16:36
Try shutdown, open it up and ensure all seatable connectors are re-seated. That's at least memory and your disk. If and when you get it working, MAKE RECOVERY DISKS. If you have valuable data on the drive, MAKE BACKUPS. – mpez0 Apr 28 '11 at 16:54
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Half an hour for formatting (I assume that's what 'initializing partition' means) is not very long on a large hard drive. Give it about another hour before you give up. – Chris Nava Apr 28 '11 at 16:58
Seriously, @Jack, use line breaks. Makes it easier for everyone to read your question – Sathya♦ Apr 29 '11 at 3:54
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Your hard drive probably has bad sectors. When the factory restore doesn't work, it's usually because it tries to restore over top of bad sectors, and if some of those files being restored onto the bad sectors are essential to booting then you'll out of luck.

Replacing the hard drive might help. If it doesn't then the next suspect would be the factory restore media (most vendors will send you a new set of factory restore CDs in the mail for a small fee).

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Replacing the HD will not help since the restore partition is on the existing drive. (not a recovery disk) – Chris Nava Apr 28 '11 at 16:56
@Chris Nava: In that case the bad sectors could also be on the "factory restore utility" partition, or there could be some other corruption there. – Randolf Richardson Apr 29 '11 at 5:06
@Chris Nava: One other possibility is that you updated the System BIOS at some point, and the factory restore procedure is only compatible with an older version of the BIOS (I've seen this happen on a few occasions over the years, but not to the extent where it prevents the factory restore procedure from the get-go, rather some of the drivers in Windows need to be updated manually afterwards is the worst side-effect I recall seeing). – Randolf Richardson Apr 29 '11 at 5:07
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up vote 1 down vote

At this point, you can waste time trying to work out the source of a systemic failure, or let the professionals handle it.

Its starting to sound like major hardware issues, and on a laptop that is simply not possible to fix for the average user. At times good advice is not what you want to hear - send it back to toshiba - let the gentlemen with the service guides and proper equipment work it out.

Its a choice between hours of your time tracking something down, or a few weeks letting someone else do it for you.

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I agree with Journeyman in this case. If it's brand new, it's not worth your time trying to get it working if you've already tried all the basics, which it sounds like you have. Taking it back for repair (or return if it's recent enough) will probably end up saving you a lot of time in the long run. – nhinkle♦ Apr 29 '11 at 6:06
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