So a client brings a laptop to me after lending it out to someone and it being returned to them broken. Laptop displays "missing operating system" and something about "check cable" in relation to some broadcom adaptor or something. Anyway I plugged the hdd into my test pc to find there was no partitions, restored the partitions using testdisk and backed up the data. Run the manufactures diagnostic software and found no errors on the hard drive, did a low level format and then put the hard drive back into the laptop where I tried to install vista on it, but it just jammed everytime it got the "completing installation" stage, so I put it back into the test rig, installed vista on it no problem and then put it back into the laptop where it simply restarted if I tried a normal boot and blue screeed for a nanosecond (thanks microsoft) and restarted if I tried to boot in safe mode.
Since I can boot from the hdd from my test pc I can only assume that the hard drive is fine and that there is another hardware problem. I'm currently running memtest86 to check if there is a memory problem and will try booting with alternating sticks but aside from that I can't really think of anything else I can do. God knows how the laptop managed to get into this state? Does anyone else have any ideas, cpu test perhaps?
Since I can boot from the hdd from my test pc I can only assume that the hard drive is fine and that there is another hardware problem. I'm currently running memtest86 to check if there is a memory problem and will try booting with alternating sticks but aside from that I can't really think of anything else I can do. God knows how the laptop managed to get into this state? Does anyone else have any ideas, cpu test perhaps?
