Toshiba Satellite S5200-701 - boot problems

A mate of mine asked me to look at his Tosh lappy but I don't normally touch
laptops so I'm flying a bit blind so to speak. First thing I should say is
that the battery is knackered so all this is with the laptop running on AC
mains power.

Out of 25 attempts, it's only successfully booted into Windows (XP Home)
just 3 times. When it does boot into Windows, as soon as it gets past the
blue "Welcome" screen and things begin to load, there's a constant beeping
sound. Doesn't matter what you do - could be in Word typing a letter; could
be looking at photographs; could be on the internet or whatever, the
bleeping constantly goes on at a rate of 1 bleep per second. Everything
seems to work OK once booted, apart from the bleeping.

On the 22 ocassions it failed to boot into Windows, almost immediately after
pressing the power button, there is just a black screen with the phrase "Set
default value? (Y/N)" at the top left, and "BIOS V1.40" at the top right -
pressing the Y or N keys has no effect whatsoever and nothing else happens
no matter what keys you press or how long you leave it.

I've tried all the usual ways of getting into the BIOS (Del; F2; F1; F8 etc)
and can't get in. I have a copy of Hiren's Boot Disc and tried to boot from
that CD but it won't. I tried setting the CD drive as the first boot device
in the Toshiba HW Utility from within Windows and also tried hitting F12 on
bootup but it will not boot from CD and I can't get in the BIOS.

One thing I noticed while in Windows was that the system clock wouldn't hold
the correct time, which I think points to a dead RTC or BIOS battery. Anyone
confirm that and give any pointers as to how I should proceed?

Thanks

 

Bill Alty wrote:

This may help:-

http://askiris.toshiba.com/ToshibaT...iceId=&dialogID=86898427&stateId=1 0 86900054

Sorry about the long line. You may need to cut and paste. It's a link to
an article on Toshiba's website describing a way round your problem.

If you go here:-

http://support.toshiba.ca/support/techsupport/ln_TechSupport.asp

And follow the links to your model, there is a download available to
make a DOS boot diskette which will let you access the BIOS setup,
assuming you have the floppy drive that came with the unit when new..

From what you describe, you either have a dead RTC battery or corrupted
CMOS settings.

 

In Bill Alty typed on Mon, 3 Aug 2009 14:37:04 +0100:

Yup, weak BIOS/RTC battery. It's a rechargeable Ni-MH Battery (Toshiba
Part# P000268840). And I don't know about this model, but some models of
Toshiba only charge the RTC battery if the screen is lit. So that is
what I would do, power on the laptop and as long as the screen is lit,
let it sit for 12 to 24 hours. If the battery is still good, it will
recharge. If not, they look like this:

http://www.impactcomputers.com/p000268840.html

 

Thanks John. Unfortunately, there's no floppy drive in the laptop and even
if there were, it seems that the answer is about halfway down the page of
the first link you gave, which says:

<quote> Q. I Cannot enter BIOS in the Satellite 5000/5100/5200 Series:
A. In this series you cannot enter the BIOS. You must use the Toshiba
Utilities (HWSetup) within Windows to make any changes. </quote>

What an absolutely stupid situation where you can't enter the BIOS!!!!

Thanks for your help anyway, my friend.

Bill

 

Ah, thanks very much Bill. I'll give it a try and we'll see what happens
)

Bill

 

This could be many things. Among them:

-Bad hard drive
-Bad memory
-Bad motherboard
-Overheating due to dirty CPU cooling system
-Bad BIOS

Although the CMOS battery may be bad, on Toshiba laptops that normally
won't prevent more-or-less normal booting.

To get into the BIOS on Toshiba laptops, you either hold down Escape
while turning on the power (and continue holding it until you see a
message), or you press the F2 key immediately after turning the machine on.

My fear is that it is the motherboard itself, but it's hard to say, and
since that's the worst possible outcome, I'd explore the others first.

 

A bad battery in a Toshiba normally does not cause any serious problems
but does cause CMOS to be reset every time the machine is powered on.
While this is annoying, it likely has nothing to do with the actual
problem(s) that the OP is experiencing.

 

I service Toshiba laptops, and I believe that information is absolutely
wrong. There has to be a way to get into the BIOS without an installed
OS, for reasons that you seem to understand quite well.

 

You could try asking on japan.comp.toshiba as there are people on there
who know more than I do about these machines.

The floppy drive on these machines is, according to Toshiba, a USB
connected device, so it may be worth trying a cheap one from Maplins to
see if it will boot from that, or try making a bootable USB stick with
DOS 6.0 or higher and the TSETUP.exe program on it. If you make a
bootable CD with just DOS and the tsetup program on it, that may work, too.

The official Toshiba part number is PA3109U-1FDD, and is listed as
available for prices between ten and forty pounds sterling.

The sequence to boot from CD given in the manual on the Toshiba website
is to turn the machine off, press F12, turn on power with F12 pressed,
and hold F12 down until the "In touch with tomorrow" screen appears.

Unfortunately, just about every Toshiba machine has a different way of
accessing this command, so even if you've got another Tosh and know the
way in, it won't help much. Toshiba have had this way of accessing the
BIOS`for a very long time now, I have a Portege 3100 which uses the same
method of modifying the BIOS. Come to that, IIRC, the very first Toshiba
laptop I bought, which had DOS 3.3 in ROM and a massive ten Meg HD, had
a program in its version of DOS to change the BIOS`settings.

 

On Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:45:51 -0400, Barry Watzman

:>I service Toshiba laptops, and I believe that information is absolutely
:>wrong. There has to be a way to get into the BIOS without an installed
:>OS, for reasons that you seem to understand quite well.
:>

Nope, that information is correct. I just recently retired after
spending over 10 years as a senior tech at a Toshiba Premier ASP. The
entire 5000 series (5000/5100/5200) are like that. The only way to
change any bios settings is via a windows based utility.

BTW, I own, and still use, a 5205 and even with the windows utility
there are only very few things you can change. I can't check what they
are right now since I installed the windows 7 rc on it for testing
purposes. Other than having to use the generic vga driver for the 64mb
nvidia geforce 460 go chip the performance isn't bad for a 6 1/2 year
old notebook.

me/2

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6290813/Toshiba-Bios-Instructions

Seems quite mad.

 

Laptops use their batteries as a UPS. Therefore those brick power
supplies are designed cheap, depending on the big battery pack to smooth
things out and make pure DC for the boards. When the battery is removed
or tits up, there is the possibility of the odd power line glitch, just
pure hum and noise, poorly regulated power being fed to the box, which
may confuse it.

Take a good digital voltmeter and measure the DC voltage unloaded and
loaded on the motherboard where it comes into the box. It shouldn't
vary hardly at all. Carefully inspect the soldering on this power
socket for any tiny hairline cracks caused by the stress put on the
socket when someone kicked the plug around. Hairline cracks are noisy
as hell, not to mention intermittenly putting it in charge-battery-
charge-battery as the plug wiggles which will drive it crazy. Switch
the dvm to AC volts and measure the hum and noise on the DC bus at this
power socket. It should read only a couple of millivolts WITH THE
COMPUTER RUNNING, not jumping all over the place adding this noise to
the data bus data.

REPLACE THE DEAD BATTERY AS IT'S DRAGGING DOWN THE POWER SUPPLY
constantly trying to charge it. That should be fairly obvious.

If the power is stable and the new battery pack doesn't solve the
problem, you're staring at a crashed hard drive which is on the edge of
failing. Laptop drives catch hell from stupid users dropping them,
bumping them when they're writing to disk. They get little respect or
thought. All you had to do to really screw them up was spin the laptop
around while the hard drive was writing some important data. The
flywheel effect on the platter(s) caused the relative motion to the head
to be wrong and THAT's NOT GOOD!

Oh, one more easy thing to do. Unplug the memory card(s) and plug them
back in several times to wipe the crud off their gold contacts. The air
INTAKE for laptops is everywhere, right against the dirty desktop by
only a few mm. Laptops are like vacuum cleaners sucking dirt in with
the air off the desks. The memory board is right against the air
intakes in most of them, so they get dirty. DO NOT BLOW COMPRESSED AIR
OVER THE STATIC SENSITIVE MOTHERBOARD OR MEMORY CARD CONTACTS! The high
voltage generated in an air conditioned room like yours will destroy
them! DO NOT VACUUM THEM OUT EITHER...same idea...static! Any plastic
whisk broom or paint brush is also a VAN DEGRAFF STATIC GENERATOR. The
equipment to blow them out is too expensive to buy, static free
workstation stuff. I like a damp paper towel with me grounded to the
motherboard through a proper high resistance static wriststrap. That's
safer. The tiny moisture left behind evaporates in a minute, don't wet
it down. the dirt sticks to the wet paper towel. Just be careful of
the static generators....



--
Larry

http://flightaware.com/analysis/allflights_movie.rvt
Each tiny red dot is an airliner in this Quicktime movie, ONE recent day
of
air travel in the USA. What would happen if "they" found out this was
the real source of air pollution or cancer or why all the bugs around my
streetlight have disappeared? Would "they" tell us? Would "they" STOP
IT?!

 

The only things in the Bios screen accessible with Esc are the date/ time
and password.
Terry

 

Re: "Therefore those brick power supplies are designed cheap, depending
on the big battery pack to smooth things out and make pure DC for the
boards."

That is not correct; laptops get their power, whether running on
batteries or on AC, from a switching power supply inside the laptop (the
laptop, like desktops, needs a variety of different voltages). Both the
battery and the external AC adapter are simply inputs to this switching
power supply (of course, the battery is also an "output", when it is
being charged).

Certainly, if you unplug the AC adapter when the computer is running on
AC and has no battery, the laptop is going to die. But switching power
supplies are relatively insensitive the quality of their INPUT power, as
long as it is not interrupted entirely for more than about 10 to 50
milliseconds. Certainly the battery does serve as a "UPS", should their
be an AC power failure, but this in no way relates to the QUALITY of the
AC power failure. And, in fact, the external AC adapters are quite good
switching power supplies; in most cases they are relatively simple,
since they only supply a single voltage. But, again, being switching
power supplies, they themselves are quite immune to QUALITY problems
with their input (the AC power from the wall), again, as long as it
doesn't fail completely for too long (10 to 50 milliseconds, depending

 

Try to Boot in the safe code with Toshiba Satellite S5200-701 'laptop
battery' (http://www.laptops-battery.co.uk).

 

DEAD mobo battery....Cant hold the BIOS values..