toshiba laptop working fine. Then tried to boot up the next day.
Getting normal Toshiba welcome screen.
press <F2> for SETUP, press <C> to boot from CD-ROM.
Then the screen goes to black with flashing cursor in left hand coner of screen. unable to proceed from there,
can get into setup.
cant get into safe mode F8

Would be most gratful for any advise as i have borrow this laptop off a friend.

Thanks in advance

Sounds like the hard disk (or its connection) has developed a fault. Go into the BIOS settings (F2 Setup screen) and use the Auto-Detect Hard Disks option if there is one (click the link in my signature to view the tutorials that I've written on this subject).

If the BIOS cannot detect the hard disk and it won't read it with the settings manually entered, then you've probably got a dead hard disk. If it's the cable that connects the hard to the motherboard that has packed up, that might be as expensive to replace as the hard disk itself if you need a Toshiba-specific cable. If the hard disk controller on the motherboard is what's died, then you've got really big problems

Hope that the Auto-detect solution gets it all back up and running - let us know how you get on

Hi many thanks for such a quick reply.
Have tried to go to the link "How to Auto-detect your hard disk"
and "..and if that didn't work, try this"
But both pages are just showing blank screen with no intructions????

thanks again

Oh yeah - looks like they've been moved! You can find the first one here: http://www.d-a-l.com/missing-drive.php

and the second here: http://www.d-a-l.com/auto-detect.php