I've been trying to fix the same thing for months, with a Satellite M115-S3094. When this first started, it would boot only from one CD which had an error. So I've been testing multiple OSes and disks. Now no CD will work, so I tried USB and that won't work, either. I don't have a floppy. It seems very strange to me that BIOS could cause CDs to boot only sometimes, but it (was) true!

Can't boot from anything but hard disk!

Ditto.



Would it be safe to try the below approach?

What if I remove the hard drive, leave the cover off, boot from SBM, use it to boot from CD, and re-install the hard drive while the laptop is on? I mean, would it even be safe to run the laptop with the cover off? Would trying to re-install the hard drive while the laptop is running lead to a short? Or just not work?

My only other computer has IDE interfaces...the only SATA-to-USB adapter I could get takes a small SATA cord .

So, before I open my laptop and do damage...
...especially since Toshiba has no diagrams...
...so getting the hard drive out will be trial-and-error...
Do laptop hard drives usually have the small or large SATA cord?

I don't want to lose 100s of new photos from my camera, which I didn't get a chance to back up before this happened, and don't have the money for data recovery services.

FWIW, Toshiba are fond of proprietary parts. The one Toshiba I tried to swap a hard disk in had a non standard connector, making that a major pain. Laptops have everything miniature, or smaller.

I made a lot of money in times past repairing systems where somebody had plugged something with the power switched on. I've seen drives plugged under windows, but it's not for the faint hearted, and the guy had cost himself a hard drive doing it. If it tries a seek when you're plugging, you're dead.
What's wrong with booting from the hard drive?

Accidentally deleted system files, and from that moment, CDs would not boot except the one, which (Fedora Core) which will not install right.

You have the story since then...went from only 1 CD will boot, to no CDs nor USBs will boot at all.

Can't run recovery software (Ultimate Boot CD) for same reason.

I asked about removing the hard drive, then plugging in the hard drive while system is running and something else booted, because the original poster said BIOS will only try to boot when hard drive is not attached. But nope, I definitely don't want to nuke the hard drive! Thank you for your warning!

My BIOS detects the CD drive...it just refuses to boot from it. There's no way to disable the hard drive in BIOS, but if I put the hard disk last, it tries PXE, so that's my last resort. (Laptop wasn't networked, so it told me a cable was unplugged, which was correct, then tried to boot from hard drive).

I've never done PXE, but trying to learn how to do it with Puppy...so I can just load an entire Puppy into RAM, then copy personal files from the hard disk to a DVD. I think the Puppy instructions are not complete, or maybe I'm missing something. I'm too tired now to work more...maybe tomorrow.

That's a mess.
Slackware have an excellent pxe howto in the cdrom - usb-and-pxe-installers/

Hello, and thank you. Yes, I saw Alien Bob wrote up a how-to on his website. There's also a Puppy how-to (in these forums/Google Docs) using LanPuppy, by gcmartin, that looks simple. (This is the one I tried in the wee hours.)

It'd be nice to do it with Puppy, because I re-did my small hard drive on this old desktop...I'll have to partition again to use Slackware, not that it's a big deal. But like I said, I'm probably so tired I misunderstood something I read. I'll see if I can get a simple PXE working with Puppy, otherwise Slack is next on the list.

Moved post(s) to new thread. OP should not resurrect old threads. Best to create a new thread and possibly link to old: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-drive-590371/