Laptop bootup woes
 

Toshiba laptop about 1.5 yrs old, windows home premium. A few days ago it refused to boot up (happened before) and reseating the hard drive fixed the problem before. This time i had to reseat the hard drive several times and kept getting an "operating system not found" upon trying to boot the computer. Finally got it to boot but now several keys on the keyboard don't work and I am stck using the onscreen keyboard. :ugh: I assume th boot and keyboard problems are related... any thoughts or ideas? thanks!

Sounds like your hard drive is on its' way to going belly up.
Back it up and install I new one if you can.

Thanks, reckoned that or the motherboard,not sure why the keyboard went TU at the same time? is it possible to copy the OS to a usb stick o r an external hard drive? andboot from there? OS disk didn;t come with computer.

are the keys that don't work grouped close together? If so you've probably dislodged the ribbon cable.....
Tosh keyboards are usually reasonably cheap and easy to find - whats the model of the machine? Usually easy to find the keyb through Googel or Ebuy.

And no you wont be able to copy to an external drive or USB stick and boot from there - the drive lettering in the registry would all be wrong
You MAY be able to get away with cloning to another drive, but if the drive is dodgy anyway you may hit problems
If Tosh didn't give you a recovery disk, you could always download an ISO of the Windows setup disk from Digital River, install from scratch and then download the drivers from Tosh, though usually theres a "make driver CD" routine on a Tosh laptop anyway (or a drivers folder you can copy)

Milo, the keys that don't work are 3,5,7,8,9,0,r,y,z,/,and the up, down, left and right scroll keys

Model is C660. Would the keyboard issue be related to the boot up issue?

unlikely the problems are related, but its not impossible

try reseating the keyboard ribbon cable, if that doesn't help then get a new keyboard
here's two offerings from Ebay, there will be plenty of others
New Toshiba Satellite Pro C660 UK Original Keyboard | eBay
Toshiba Satellite C660 Keyboard New UK Fits C650 C665 L660 Black V114326CK1 on eBay!

Simple to change these as long as you don't break the plastic strip when you lever it out......

Its worth noting that this model series has a particularly nasty keyboard - the keys are too soft to the touch, and its a fine art between the touch not registering, and them "sticking" with resultant double keying.
Not a range of machines for use by a heavy user typist

Thanks again, Milo, will have a look at ebay.au. when I get time. The first time the thing wouldn;t boot up, I took it to a computer shop and they reseated the hard drive, when I got it back, the scroll keys and the ? didn't work. Then last week when it wouldn't boot up and I reseated the hard drive and got it to boot up, the other keys (see previous post) didn't work. And still don't. That's why I thought the 2 problems were related.

then I'd guess that during the checks they removed the keyboard and failed to reseat the cable correctly
dunno why they would do that to check the hard drive, maybe they did a bit more
the video shows how to reseat the cable - just watch the ZIF socket, very easy to overdo it and rip the clip out