Toshiba Tecra won't boot

[Chris Wilson]

Old, probably pretty worthless, but of great sentimental value to my wife as it was her late father's who recently died. Running Windows XP it ran fine until yesterday. No on trying to boot it it attempts to boot from a LAN drive that doesn't exist. I checked in the BIOS that the boot order was sensible and correct, and it was. I changed it, and changed it back again, to no avail. I tried another hard drive known to be OK with a different copy of XP on it. Exactly the same result, it very quickly (too quickly?) decides no bootable drives are available locally and goes looking for a LAN drive. I tried reinstalling XP (XP Pro Corporate) and it hangs after a few minutes saying something about hardware of software problems, to try booting into safe mode. F8 won't work, it goes straight to the none booting attempt from a none existent LAN drive. Within reason I'd like to get this working again, what should I try now? Thanks.

 

[Chris Wilson]

I took it apart (pesky things aren't they?) and it now comes up IDE #1 Error


Then 10 seconds later it says it can't find a LAN drive. So it appears it may not be finding the single HDD??


In the bios there's no text showing size, type or anything for the HDD or the IDE CD reader. Just boot options and boot order 9which do show inbuilt and second HDD as options, although there's nowhere I can see for a second HDD internally, and it has no USB HDD option. So taking it apart and re-seating all the ribbons and the two memory sticks and putting it back together has done something I guess. I have a Magic Bridge that is USB linked, I will see if it has the right adapter to read the small form factor laptop IDE hard drive on my main PC, just in case both are duff. I can't see me keeping a duff drive however, although it's probably sat unused for a few years. Ideas very welcome.