Re: Booting a Toshiba Laptop

t thThanks for the information.  This is being checked out to see if it can be easily fixed for a friend’s grandson to use - games, nothing important.  I don’t have any SSDs lying around and we don’t want to spend much on it.  It tends to run very hot so I suspect it is not long for this world in any case.  I can probably find an old spinner lying around I could try, but how should it be formatted?  MBR or GPT?

I suspect at this time, that it would be cheaper to replace with a cheap laptop.

-- Doug

> On Sep 5, 2024, at 19:24, David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> wrote:
> 
> On 9/5/29:1 is2, Doug Hardie wrote:
>> I am checking out a Toshiba Satellite A655 laptop.  I have no problems booting a USB memstick for Freebsd 14.1.  However, it appears the internal drive has some issues.  It writes zeros just fine over the entire disk.  It errors quickly when writing random data.  So the question is if the problem is the drive or interface chips.  I tried to build an external drive with the memstick but it will not boot however I format it.  The memstick is GPT with both a MBR boot and UFE boot.  I have tried every combination I can think of and none of them work on an external spinner.  How should the drive be formatted to boot?
>> -- Doug
> 
> 
> If it has the original 2.5" SATA HDD from ~2010, the drive could be bad.  Do you have a bootable live USB stick with smartctl(8) to test the internal drive?
> 
> 
> It looks like the internal drive is externally accessible:
> 
> https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Toshiba+Satellite+A665-S5170+Hard+Drive+Replacement/74527
> 
> 
> I would put in a known good 2.5" SATA SSD, do a short SMART test, and try installing FreeBSD.
> 
> 
> David
> 
>