My Toshiba Satellite laptop became unusable a few days ago. I have exhausted my knowledge and am hoping someone here can help.
My husband and son had been having trouble with blue screens but the computer had been working fine for me. My son was introducing my husband to Minecraft and I was assuming a mod or something else minecraft related was the source of their trouble except that my husband was having issues even when minecraft wasn't running. He tried deleting his windows account and I created a new one for him. He was never able to successfully login to the new windows account, it hung up on the 'Loading Windows' screen.
The next time I got on the computer I noticed that the Toshiba Message Board wanted me to install 2 updates - one was a Toshiba diagnostic/repair tool that I don't recall the name of and the other was BIOS 2.
I did the BIOS update thinking perhaps that might help with the other problems. The computer restarted successfully, and I did the other update and restarted successfully again. My husband still couldn't login. I started a defrag and we went out for the evening.
The next morning when I went to use the computer I found an error screen up that read:
Windows Boot Manager
Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer.
This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external USB drive while the device is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and
then restart your computer.
If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.
Status: 0xc00000e9
Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred.
My two options (Enter to continue or Esc to exit), both lead to a Windows Error Recovery screen that gives me another two options:
Launch Startup Repair (recommended)
Start Windows Normally
If I choose the second it goes to the 'Starting Windows' screen for a minute, the dots at the bottom don't appear and it dumps me back at the Boot Manager error.
If I choose the Launch Startup Repair it goes to a screen that says 'Loading Windows Files' with a status bar. The status bar flashes full then starts loading from the bottom, gets less than 1/4 of the way along, hangs for a minute and then dumps me back at the Boot Manager error. Lather, rinse repeat.
So far I have tried (in no particular order) ->
1) Turning the computer off for varying lengths of time including overnight
2) Putting my Toshiba Recovery discs in and restarting (including reconfiguring in BIOS to boot from the CD/DVD drive before the hard drive)
3) Starting in Safe Mode
4) Loading Last Known Good Configuration
5) Removing and replacing the Battery and checking the connections on the 2 cables behind access panels without removing the entire back of the laptop
None of these has been successful.
I have most of my files on a partition other than the system partition, so I was hoping a reinstall of windows would save me, but don't know of any way to start that process that I haven't already tried. I do have one file on my desktop that hasn't been backed
up recently that I would reeeeeeally prefer not to lose, but at this point getting the computer working at minimal cost is top priority.
Any ideas would be most appreciated!
