Hello all,

I'm new to this forum and new to using a boot CD. I woke up this morning and found that my Toshiba laptop had shutdown of its own accord, and, now, I'm unable to get the computer to reboot. It's in a continual reboot loop. I can't even go into safe mode. I did some research online via my iPhone and found that one solution may be to boot the computer off a CD. Hence, why I'm here! What exactly do I do once I boot off the CD? Is that it or will I need to troubleshoot and fix the error?

Any help would be extremely appreciated! I have tons of documents on my computer, and I don't want to lose them.

Thank you in advance!
Andrew

My suggestion could be to boot into UBCD, insert a UFD, and select PartedMagic from the boot menu.

Using PMagic, you could try to copy the important documents to your UFD. Whatever happens after that, you would already have your important documents saved/backup-ed.

But, if you are not already used to boot with rescue CDs/DVDs/UFDs, my guess is that in this case you have better chances to recover your info by requesting help from someone that already knows how to do it.

The potential reasons for the problem/behavior you described are too many to know if this is something very simple to resolve, or if your HDD (and hence, your documents) is already "gone".

Thank you so much for the advice! Any suggestions on a good expert service? Thanks again!

Well, it is a Toshiba laptop, so maybe you could start looking from there. Or maybe you have some "geek" friend who could take a first look at it. In any case, the "first, do no harm" approach is generally better in regards to data.

Keep in mind that there are general services, recovery services, and hardware services. Before sending your laptop to anyone, you should be clear about what you expect. For example, if you are interested in recovering the (specific) info, you should ask if that is part of the service (and costs), or they simply go back to factory defaults (if they can), with no data (your own documents) recovery.

As I mentioned above, your current problem could be something that takes 10 minutes to solve and no data nor hardware loss, or it may be a "complete disaster" (or anything in between).

For the future, you would know that you need regular backups, and if you are interested, you could practice and learn how to use recovery and testing tools and methods (from battery and power checking, to...), before actually having a problem.

Of course, all this is only IMHO. You can still search for other suggestions.

I really appreciate all your help, Ady. I'll be off to an "expert" this weekend. If you're curious, I can post my resolution.

Thanks again!!!

Andrew

you can post the resolution here if you want, so that others that are curious on how you got to fix it, people can read it here and maybe get some points to help them out too.
Rocket Italian
Rocket Japanese

Will do!