Toshiba Satellite A300 won't boot, how to diagnose?

Question

I have a Toshiba Satellite A300 19P, It was working normally a week ago, today it just won't boot.

After the initial Toshiba boot logo, I get a black screen and nothing happens, I hear the computer buzzing as usual.

I can access the boot menu normally, but the PC just won't boot to the hard drive. Is there a System diagnostics tool out there that I can use to run low-level checkups? Something that I could boot from CD?

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Edit: CD won't boot either, I'm only getting a black screen. The only thing I can do is to access the BIOS menu.

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Edit: Hard Drive is OK, I found another laptop, plugged the Toshiba's harddrive in and it booted without any trouble, so now I suppose it is a problem with the motherboard or maybe disk/cdrom controller.

Answer 1

It sounds like your hard drive is bad, if you can go into BIOS but windows is not booting up, it might be hard drive is bad or OS is corrupted.

First I would go to the BIOS and see if it recognize the hard drive.

if it does recognize it then you might need to check for bad sectors, There is a decent CD you can download&Burn and boot from it to check the hard drive/memory/motherboard/etc.

Ultimate Boot CD http://mrbass.org/ubcd/