Solved! Toshiba A300 Randomly Shuts Down - HELP!

[thepcphysician]

Hi everyone,

I have a Toshiba A300, which is approximately 13 months old - failures always occur just outside of warranty, don't they? First sign of trouble came when I left it on overnight, and woke up to find the OS (Windows Voldemort) corrupt and unbootable. I figured it was time for a Windows 7 install anyway, so I pulled my files off with a Knoppix live CD and left it installing 7. Came back to find the computer off. Tried again. Same thing. Pretty much, it refuses to run for more than about 30 minutes without abruptly shutting off, making it useless - I can't even install an OS in that amount of time. It works perfectly though while it js running. My first suspicion was overheating, so I opened it up and cleaned it out, even though it was remarkably clean to begin with. But even on a cooling pad, where it is cool to the touch, it does the exact same thing, on AC or battery. Ideas?

 

[Modernchild]

it's like cars. Troubles began after warranty period. I would recommend to check your hdd with a software like hard disk sentinel to watch for a bad clusters. I guess that the problem is hardware oriented. It looks like your ram or another part of device is broken. I have the same problems later and all this sudden switches off's or reboots were hardware stuff. Try to put off your battery and to work just with a cable power.
Maybe placing win xp may help.

 

[thepcphysician]

As I mentioned, I have tried both AC and battery power, with the same effect. I agree that it is definitely a hardware problem, but I fail to see how a bad hard drive could cause these symptoms. Likewise, I fail to see how using XP would help solve the problem, especially since there's no way I could install XP with the issues I'm having...

 

[thepcphysician]

Anyone else?

 

[caldeireiro]

Same problem with my A300-1ID laptop

 

[kokinator]

Some client of mine brought his lap (yeah, some A300 series too) with sudden shutdown problems so i also thought it was overheating and proceed cleaning the heatsink system, still, kept doing the same. I ran diagnostics sw for the HDD which was ok other than a partition trouble due to the constant shutdowns, ran usb memtest, ok too.

Then i took out the HDD and zeroit with some tool to make a fresh install...guess what?. No can do. Just after tamporal files are extracted and ready to install. It reboots and starts over again. I've tried with the original recovery set discs, W7 DVD, and even attempt to install over USB. Which took me to the next.

I then remembered my old 256MB thumbdrive with a Portable BartPEs XP OS. And yes, it worked. For hours and hours with A/C and/or Battery.

So I concluded the problem was somewhere in the SATA channel. because, this Portable XP loads exclusively in a virtual disk in RAM.

 

[zeafer]

Hi All,

I have found that a BIOS update has solved these problems. If you go to the official Toshiba website you can download a BIOS update utility (under the Windows Vista software updates).

When I first tried to run the "Vista" utility it failed. But Windows automatically applied a "compatibility" fix and asked me to run it again (I think it was just running the tool as Administrator). When I ran the tool again the BIOS was updated and the machine was restarted. Since then, all of the issues I was having have been resolved.

Hope this helps.

 

[Notsosure]

A solution to such problems is provided here:
http/www.tomshardware.com/forum/54070-35-toshiba-satellite-a200-random-shutdown