Hello everyone!
I just joined here,so I must say I am a newbie.

I have the following two problems:

PROBLEM 1: I have a Toshiba Satellite SA80-127 laptop that I am trying to put to use.

The drive is MK4025GAS HD2190 40 Gb .

It used to work just fine.ABout two years ago a full cup of coffee spilled over the keyboard.I dried it with the cool setting of a blowdrier and cleaned it with q tips.Two days later I turned it on...it booted and went into Windows perfectly.To make sure it's really clean from the coffee I gave it to a computer tech 2 years ago and he cleaned it.No problem later.
However about a year ago it had crashed again following a plane ride.I gave it to another tech,who cleaned it again but it had refused to boot and he said the laptop is as good as my new doorstop.20 minutes later I started it and it worked perfectly.
3 months ago started giving me a blue screen and rebooting itself whenever i tried to watch a movie,that was the only issue.so I just didnt watch movies and it did fine.Yesterday it rebooted itself again and this time i got the "A DISK READ ERROR OCCURED.Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete" message going into a repetitive cycle.And also my CD drive doesn't read any cds whatsoever.
I can get into BIOS fine (PhoenixBios v1.20 without USB BOOT SUPPORT) I have default settings loaded.
In Bios drive is seen,however it will not boot up from it.

I have a full backup of all the data on it,as well as an iso image of the windows,which cannot be read by my cd drive and a full backup of the drivers on an external HDD.
WHAT DO I DO?

PROBLEM 2:[/b] I just got a brand new ST3160215A Seagate Barracuda 3.5" 160GB IDE hard drive,and as I only noticed it's 3.5" after i had already bought it,a 3.5" to 2.5" IDE transition cable and a usb to 3.5"/2.5" IDE cable.
I havent done anything to the new drive except plug in the USB to IDE cable to see if it fits.
Any suggestions on istallation of the drive,and if it is impossible to use this one to boot up my toshiba satellite with it,please let me know as I will give the new drive to my boyfriend (he wants to have it as a second drive,but said the way his DVD/CD-RW and HDD are connected to the motherboard is unique and a masterpiece of idiotism.)

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR ALL KINDS OF TIPS,INFORMATION AND THE TIME SPENT ON MY PROBLEM!

Hi,

Where to begin?



Sounds like your laptop could be the problem and not the drive at all, could be an issue on the IDE bus, you should test the Toshiba hard drive externally to make sure.

As for attaching the 3.5" drive to the laptop in any other way than by USB - why? The laptop will not be able to power the drive for a start.

The simplest way forward is to test the drive outside of the laptop and if the laptop turns out to be the fault you can either replace it or simply replace the motherboard.

This is a data recovery forum and you say you have your data backed up...

Hey granaryloaf!
Thank you so much for the quick responce!
Turns out it's a corrupted boot.ini that got me losing my mind here..The original drive has booted ok after i ran XP recovery console.
The point of the 3.5 HDD was because my boyfriend got it for himself to use as external on his desktop as he can't put a second internal drive at least not without trouble,because the guy who assembled the box has connected the dvd rw and hdd in such a way that the next guy who checked his computer up said he's never seen that before.The 3.5 came with a charger (Y USB i think).So it's just a new drive i had available before i go on buying one.

I'm so sorry I thought this is a hdd issues of all kind forum,I guess I was just losing it with this problem so i must have been on the pc 24 7 looking for a solution.

Thank you very much again.

Ophelia

Well it is a hard disk forum I guess, perhaps that was uncalled for.

One word of caution, would normally suggest that the system cannot find the internal hard disk drive or that the drive has unreadable sectors. This could, as I suggested earlier, be down to a problem with the internal bus or it could also be an intermittent hard disk problem.

It may of course be neither, just keep your eye out for it acting up further!