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I have a Toshiba Satellite 2455-S305. Hard drive crashed recently - it was completely gone so I bought a new 60 GB hard drive and replaced my old drive (which was also 60 GB). Tried to run the recovery CD, but it aborts after trying to format the disk - the formatting goes up to 50 or 60%, then suddenly the screen goes blank, and there is no further activity.
Can anybody help?
Did the drive come with a CD? It should have. It should require you to boot off of the CD and it will set up the disk for you in preparation of installation of the OS.
If it did not come with a CD you may have to FDISK to create a partition and set it active.
Then you may have to format the disk before your recovery dist will work.
Is there a way to get the operating system from the original disk? Is there way to 'unhide" the hidden partition?
The image on the OEM disk? Obviously. But is it in the image on the recovery CD? Most of the ones I've used (HP/Compaq/Sony) are made that way. But a new Dell at work doesn't even have a recover CD, nor a utility to create one. If the hard drive physcially dies, it's gone. (I have a set of all the discs needed anyway, but I still don't like it.) I wonder how Toshiba's disk is made - with an OS, or only as a boot disk to get the data on the extra partition reinstalled to the active partition.
Yes, it is in the Ghost image on the Recovery CD... at least it is for the newer Toshiba Satellite models.
When you boot from the Recovery CD, it initiates a "dump" of the original OEM configuration - including Windows and all the trialware -
oh, and the Toshiba specific software of course.
Good. If they have to do "recovery discs", that's the way it should be. That hidden partition crap really sucks.
As for the original poster's dilemma, I wonder if the problem is that the laptop is going into a sleep mode (inactive?) during the format process? Maybe a BIOS setting change would help - extend the time before the system goes into standby or something.
recovery completed successfully on my new hard disk, but it doesn't
boot. I booted the machine with Bart PE CD; it looks like the recovery
process has copied a lot of OS files onto the disk - but why doesn't it
boot? (Boot sequence is correct) What is missing? Is there something in
the hidden partition on the original hard disk that needs to be copied?