At Power on, computer goes directly to Multi boot page, then stalls.
Mon, 2008-05-12 18:09 — Gepetto9
I'm not sure that this is the right forum, but here goes. I'm using a Toshiba Satellite L35 series laptop with Home Edition XP sp2 and encountered a problem, which I hope does not require me to use my Recovery disks. I believe that this occurred when the power off button was pushed while the laptop was booting up. Anyhow, since then, when I turn on the power, the unit automatically goes into the multi boot frame. However, I'm not able to get to any of the options. If I highlight an option (including Safe Mode) the frame freezes. I do have 2 Recovery and Allpication/Drivers disks but am reluctant to use them as I may lose all my data. Thanks for any help that you can give.
Replace the boot files
What I would try first is to replace the boot files, assuming that one of them got overwritten and thus damaged.
It could also be that the folder structure of the drive is damaged. This can sometimes be repaired with: chkdsk /f
If this command yields many error messages, then you've had it. The data on the disk are probably beyond repair.
An interesting and in this case very useful exercise is to create a boot diskette, a boot CD, or a boot DVD. A boot CD is the same as a boot diskette. Just make sure you elect to make the CD bootable in your favorite CD-burning program and copy the same files onto it as prescribed for the boot diskette.
For all other solutions, of course, since the computer doesn't boot, you have to get the hard disk into a running system, either by booting a working system from a CD, DVD, or a memory stick or by connecting the hard disk to another computer. Then you can run chkdsk /f and copy the boot files from the working system onto yours. Don't copy boot.ini though, that text file may be different on other computers.
To connect a 2.5 inch disk to a normal desktop computer, you have to buy a cheap adapter.
The other way to proceed is a repair installation. However, this also has two problems:
Good luck, and please report here (click on reply) to let us all know what happened.