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Hi,
I have a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422 laptop which I had given to my brother who. Since I bought this laptop second hand Toshiba does not know that what is the problem in the machine exactly. He had added a new plug and play device to the laptop and tried to boot the laptop from that media. After that it is not working at all. I cannot even access the BIOS. What to do here.
You can update your BIOS for that. You will need to create a Bootable floppy drive for that. There are various tools on internet which offers you some utility to flash bios. But you must first ensure that his one is really needed to do. Because if you perform this improperly then you motherboard will become dead. Check all the connections first properly and your OS.
I had went through this similar process where I had to at the end flash my BIOS settings. For this first disconnect your laptop and other attached devices to it. Then you have hold FN+B or FN+F while turning it from a usb floppy support device. The recovery floppy drive will provide dos base environment unless your chip is fine and functioning well. You will first have to create a bootable floppy disc.
You will need a usb floppy disc for this. Just connect it and then you can visit the official site of Toshiba site and get the BIOS update utility. It will generate a bootable floppy disc for your system. Then you can just connect and reboot your system. After that you have to press fn+f or win+f so that the flashing of bios can take place. But be sure that if this fails then your system will be dead.
I will recommend first to re-install windows and then checkout weather that can be fixed just by installation. Because many times just a fresh installation of Windows makes the system work, where there is no need of flashing bios. Bios flashing is a complicated task. If you find further more issue in your laptop then you can show the same to your nearest service center.
I too have a similar model laptop which is failed to work. I had even tried to make it work via external drive. But no success yet. I am going to perform a Bios Flash by using a external floppy drive. If the system still does not work then that simply means is that the system is completely dead and may need a replacement of motherboard. You can just give a try for that.
Since finding a solution was a very confusing experience, here is how I fixed it (it should work for most similar models.)
Now read it all the way through because the steps are critical.
I got a Toshiba Satellite A215 PSAFGU (S6814) And after shutting down from overheating during a flash from windows it didn't boot. Black screen and nothing more. Meanning my bios was corrupt
So after lots of trial and error, using an external usb floppy drive I managed to save my laptop.
Maybe people here describe how to do it, but they tell you to download the wrong crisis recovery files and once you try to use your ROM instead of the one on the disk, or try to replace phlash16.exe it just fails. Tried injecting but that didn't work.
Finally I found a good Phoenix crisis copy at : http://mods.myftp.org/Tools/CrisDisk...;_Recovery.rar
unrar and go to the directory, then unrar (you'll see it) CRISDISK.rar .
This copy of crisis with phflash16.exe (in the extracted directory) is a good version that can handle the newest versions of bios ROM.
Now copy your ROM file to the crisisdisk directory renaming the file to bios.wph and thus replacing the existing one.(i used the new 2.0 version ROM from the Toshiba site - in this case its called m10a200.rom)
To prevent 'dos path' errors when building the disk, copy the entire directory to a simple one like c:\cirsis
Build your disk now by running CRISDISK.BAT - the process includes quick formatting, copying the three files, and lastly making it bootable, make sure you go through all the steps. ( at first, i messed the last part by not having it bootable and it failed ofcourse)
once it says it created the disk successfully, put it in your external usb drive (or use the disk you created to make a bootable flash drive by using hp drivekey boot utility available here: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...X-UNITY-I23839 I didn't have a chance to test it with usb flash drives, but it should work.)
Now once you connected your media to the usb port on your laptop:
make sure the battery is out, power cord out, hold fn+f, while doing that, plug the cord and then push the power button, release the fn+f key once you see the light on your usb drive/usb floppy is starting to blink. it should pause for a few seconds, and then start reading the disk for a while (not just 3 seconds). Process should not take more then 10 minutes so waiting more then that is a waste(trust me). The computer should reboot byitself if everything is fine. Mine took about 5 minutes but give it 10 just to make sure.
After hours of finding, replacing, injecting, only this worked.
This works for sure, if you follow these instructions with your Toshiba Satellite A215. Don't loose hope - you will recover it.
A good sign is when using the fn+f method and it flashed the usb drive/floppy. It means its 99% recoverable.
Really hope this saves time for others.
-Yariv
to download my own version of crisis disk with the new v2.0 rom bios. ready to build the floppy by running the crisdisk.bat:
http://rapidshare.com/files/41096351...ip.html
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Thanks Yarvic. I tried your method with flash disk and it didn't work but I tried it with a floppy disk and it worked perfectly. God bless you man. I tried everything but it didn't work and your solution saved my time and money. Thanks again.
Thanks, thanks and thanks again. You saved me money, time, frustration and I have a computer again. Muchas gracias.
By the way, it was done with and SD using a USB adapter, I used bios version 1.70, Toshiba Satellite A215 updated from bios 1.0 that was having the black screen problem and just went all black. Thanks again Yariv from Tony in New York City.