Occasional booting problem - Toshiba/Vista

Prime · 12 Jan 2009 at 17:51

Have a Toshiba Tecra which has occasional booting problems that seem to be becoming more frequent. Sometimes it won't boot into Vista and instead you need to boot into safe mode before getting back into Vista.

Any ideas on what it could be? Whether hardware or software related.
Have defragged and checked the HD, all updates are on and when it works it's fine. Just the occassional boot up in which you sometimes have to power cycle a few times and go through safe mode before booting properly.

Perhaps hard drive needs to be reseated?

Shadows1990 · 12 Jan 2009 at 18:35

When you have the problem of booting into Vista, do you have any USB Devices plugged in?

Prime · 12 Jan 2009 at 20:16

A whole host of them.
There one 4 port hub which has a mouse, keyboard, external harddrive (switched off). There's also a printer which is usually powered off as well.
Also have an external monitor plugged in for extra.

The notebook is used as a base station most of the time and mains powered, though the battery is attached as well. Seems rather temperamental at times.

Shadows1990 · 12 Jan 2009 at 20:40

I would recommend unplugging the devices when booting, or looking in the BIOS. Sometimes laptop's BIOS settings are set so that the USB can be used as a boot device.
Try setting it so the USB device comes AFTER the hard drive, and see how you get on

Prime · 12 Jan 2009 at 20:47

Have had to resort to that method at times but it seems a little odd that this is happening now when previously it did not, talking about a 1 year period with not many problems, been fairly recent. Will take a look at the bios though in any case to see what order it's in though i'm fairly certain it's either disable or is indeed set after the hard drive.

When the problem happens it's either a black screen so the power button has to be cycled, or it takes you direct to the option to select safe mode, safe mode with networking etc.

Is there any particular reason having the usb devices would stop the laptop from booting?

Thanks

Shadows1990 · 12 Jan 2009 at 22:04

Yes, it's fairly simple.
The system is looking for a bootloader on the External Hard Drive, which doesn't exist, and so it loops around looking for one. This appears to the user as if the system is 'hanging'.

As for the safe mode option screen appearing, this is a safety feature of Vista.
If Vista is not loaded correctly, or is not shut-down correctly, it is unable to set a flag on the primary hard drive that it did so, hence it brings the error message.

Hope the BIOS settings fix it.