[Notebook64]

My partners son has a 2 year old toshiba e laptop that has become slow over time. I had made a backup of the system with office etc installed using acronis. Anyway, decided to clear it off by running acronis and the image saved. The program runs as normal and it drops down to a dos like screen ready to restore. It then sits there with the curser flashing as normal and then it locks up, and doesnt allow you to browse to the image. I though that this may be currupted, so reinstalled acronis. Made an acronis boot disk to run the image and it ignores the disk and boots staight to the normal harddisk (ide 0) Still no joy. Then tried the laptops resore disk. In the bios I specified cd first, and also the restore disk says place in drive and turn off. Then as it boots hit f12 which brings up a menu allowing you to boot from cd. This I do, but it doesnt appear to look at the cd and just loads windows from the Hdisk. I removed the cd from system devices and rebooted. It found it and added the new device to itself and requested a reboot. Still no joy. scanned with norton. still no good. removed norton. same. Able to read from the cd and also write to it as well. Ran toshibas diagnostics on the device and all appears ok with it.
Tried to make a boot disk on flash stick, but this is ignored also, even though specified boot using other devices.
Basically it looks like I cant get it to look at the cd before loading off the hdisk.


Any info / help much appreciated

[serverguy]

First I would try booting another computer off the windows restore disk. If that won't boot then it is the disk at fault.

If it does boot then it is a hardware problem.

Have you been into the BIOS and set the first boot device to the right CD drive?

Can you hear the drive spin up when you turn the laptop on with a CD in it?

It sounds to me as if the Acronis backup you made is corrupt but this does not explain why the Windows CD won't boot.