Toshiba Corrupt bios Recovery

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On one of our previous blogs we reviewed and demonstrated on how to recover your computer / laptop from a corrupt bios using the EPROM / EEPROM MCUmall True-USB PRO GQ-4X Willem Programmer 

Now we are going to show you how you can recover from a corrupt bios using no specialist equipment.

This method will require the use of a floppy disk media, CD/DVD or a standard usb stick flash media device. This method is commonly known as"Bios Crisis recovery disk method".

The bios is the first part of software code to run when you switch on a computer. This code gives instructions for the power on self test (post). This self test checks and ensures that the computer has all the required parts eg disks memory etc and that they function.

Most modern computer bioses can be recovered by using a crisis disk whether this be via a floppy or usb disk media. On some computers however when the bios boot tables become corrupt this can be problematic as this normally requires the bios chip to be manually reprogrammed or replaced. If your bios boot tables have become corrupt then this process will probably not be successful.

We were recently contacted by one of our clients who had corrupted the bios to his Toshiba A100-210 Model PSAA8E laptop.

Our client had visited the official Toshiba website and downloaded the bios for his laptop from here

He then carried out the procedure of updating his bios as instructed. 

The Toshiba bios program seemed to run and complete as confirmed at the end of the update. However when the laptop re-booted he noticed that the start up screen seemed to stay stuck on the blue bios start-up screen. He was then unable to get the laptop to progress further and boot to his windows xp installation.

There was a lot of private data which was now UN-accessible. In desperation the laptop was given to us to see if it could be recovered. We are not sure why the bios update had failed as our client seemed to suggest that he had carried the update as recommended.

 

We knew that this laptop has a Phoenix Bios so our first attempt was to try the bios disk recovery method. 

For this method which we have successfully used before you will need a usb floppy disk drive with 1.44M floppy media. You will also need to download files as instructed below. In brief we will create a recovery diskette which will have a good copy of the bios file. For this particular laptop a good copy of the bios file will be available within the download below.

This is a step by step instructions on how we carried out the bios disk recovery method.

1. Download the BiosRocoveryMethod.rar file from here  This will have all the files required to create the floppy diskette and a good copy of the bios file for this laptop.
2. Use winrar to decompress the downloaded file and place them in a folder on your desktop.
3. Now you will need a floppy drive or usb stick. We used a usb floppy drive as we no from experience that the usb stick will be unsuccessful with the recovery of this particular laptop.
4. You need to carefully read the instructions in the BiosRocoveryMethod folder downloaded earlier.
5. You will now need to Click on the Phoenix_Crisis_Recovery.exe to make a bootable Floppy.
6. Copy all the files from Rescue folder to your newly created bootable floppy diskette.
7. Rename your BIOS file to bios.wph and copy it to your floppy diskette. We have provided a good copy of the bios file for this laptop.
8. Now un-plug the power to your laptop. Connect your usb floppy drive to your usb port with the newly created bios recovery diskette.
9. Hold down FN+F keys on the keyboard and while holding plug the computer in to the power and press the power button.
10. You should hear the laptop bleeping and also the floppy drive being read and working. Hold the keys for a while and then let go.
11. Leave the laptop for at least 10 minutes. Within this time the laptop may also repeatedly bleep whilst also copying the new bios file to your laptop.
12. If the laptop does not restart itself after about ten minutes turn the power down and re-start the laptop

Hopefully the laptop will re-start and at the intial bios boot screen ensure that you set your bios to "Load bios Defaults".

Your laptop should now boot to your xp installation and hopefully you will have recovered from your corrupt bios.

A few words of caution. This method with the provided bios file is only for the Toshiba A100-210 Model PSAA8E laptop. Do not use this file if you are going to use this method for a different laptop / computer. If you do use this method for a different computer / laptop which has a phoenix bios be sure to use a bios file for that computer or laptop and re-name to bios.wph.

You should also be aware that updating the computer / laptop bios carries risks and could render your motherboard completely dead if things go wrong.

We are providing the contents here for educational purposes and offer no guarantee that this process will work for you. On this note you should be aware that by carrying out the processes here you do so at your risk.

We hope our readers have enjoyed our project and will come back to www.punj.co.uk for our views on more technological projects and products.

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