Recovering Toshiba L300 with partition.

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blueparukia

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Mar 1, 2008
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Ok, I'm in a bit of a dilhemma.

I have a friend's laptop here, a Toshiba Satellite L300-ST2501 which needs to be reformatted. The laptop does not have the default Toshiba Vista operating system on (its been improperly formatted before), but it still has the 10GB recovery partition on it.

It is currently using a copy of Vista Home Premium, but with no drivers.

I tried grabbing a WiFi and display driver from here:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/...300-ST2501&selCategory=3&selFamily=1073768663

which failed [H]ard. The Wifi driver did not work, and the display driver would not install (saying minimum system requirements were not met)

So is there any way to create a recovery disc from the spare partition (pressing F8 on boot did not give me the correct options) or correct drivers for WiFi and Display?

Thank you muchly
 
Grab something that has Fdisk on it, or some tool that can set a partition as Active. Use that tool to make the recovery partition Active (it's already a Primary partition) and it'll boot into the recovery mode - at least that's how I've restored countless Sony/Toshiba/IBM/HP/Compaq/Gateway models that have that recovery partition and running Vista.

That's all that's typically required, just making that partition Active usually does it and gets the recovery started if that's the intention (a true factory restore).

As for drivers, if the ones offered by Toshiba (typically the same ones included with the laptop to begin with from the factory) don't work, something's fishy...
 
Something is quite fishy, though I probably got the model number wrong. I tried a "driver detective" which seemed t find drivers, but would not let me install them without paying $30 :p

So I'll try this 'active' thing later tonight, cheers. :D
 
The best way to find drivers? You, searching for stuff yourself, on the manufacturer's site for the given model of product and the hardware that makes it up. If you can't instantly tell who makes a particular component, you can use the PCI Vendor and Device IDs provided by Device Manager's Details tab at www.pcidatabase.com and get the maker of the device and track down drivers that way.

Takes some time, but considering those shitty "driver finder" apps are horrible things in the first place, do it yourself and you've got something more trustworthy. :)
 
I know I've been to Toshiba's site, found the drivers and none worked, I put that in my first post.

Anyway, installed Paragon on the laptop, made the recovery partition active and run the restoration wizard. Now its back to Toshiba norm, complete with those Google Craplets.

Thanks for your help Joe.
 
If the option exists to create some recovery DVDs, my suggestion is "Get 'er done..." and soon. Some OEMs, like Gateway and HP, only allow you to make one set of those recovery discs, just one set, one time, and then it modifies files on the recovery partition so you can't do it again. Stupid, in my opinion, with no logical reason (piracy of such stuff would be stupid as it's usually tied to the given brand and also to the given model of hardware) but... regardless, if the option exists someplace on the Start Menu under some Toshiba heading, get 'er done and keep 'em safe.

Glad my suggestions helped.
 
Yes, there is now a "Recovery Disc Creator" on the desktop, so I should probably use that :p

Thanks heatless as well ;)
 
Try this it save my butt on my Dell studio 1535 i did the same thing and formatted my os partition and this works great.

First, it's not <Ctrl> + <Fl> for dell's vista systems, it's <F8>. Now, if when you press <F8> to get to the advanced boot up options you "don't see the option "repair your computer" then you've somehow broken the recovery disk feature. (I broke it by reinstalling vista straight from the installation disk, which sucked because it took hours and I didn't even install the drivers correctly - Not only do you have to have all the right drivers you have to install them in a specific order). Trust me when I tell you it's much easier and faster to use the ghost image from the recovery drive than to do it all by hand.

I don't want to accidentally format my drive again so I can't give the most detailed step by step instructions, but here's basically how you run the recovery image manually:

1) Boot from the installation cd. (if you try to do the next steps without booting from the cd, it will tell you that the files are currently in use, blah blah blah)

2) There's an option somewhere to go to a command prompt.

3) Once at the command prompt, switch to the D: (or whatever drive your recovery image is on)

4) type "cd d:\dell\image\"

5) type "dir" you should see a file named Factory.wim (If it's not, note the exact name of the wim file)

6) type "cd d:\tools\"

7) there is a program in this directory called imagex.exe. Run the following command "imagex finfo d:\dell\image\Factory.wim" This command will scroll a bunch of information about your image file. The

" only info you need is the index number. look for the tag that says <IMAGE INDEX = "#"> (in my case, the # is 1, which it should be on everyone elses too)

8) type "imagex /apply d:\dell\image\Factory.wim 1 c:\" (where "1" is that image index # from above and c:\ is the drive I want windows installed on)

9) Viola! What you have done is install the factory version of vista on your system with all the drivers and programs just as when you pulled it out the box. The only difference is that it installed over you previous copy of vista, so your old files and programs are still there. If you want a completely clean fresh copy of vista you can now restart your system and do the <F8> thing, which will format the drive before installing the factory image.
 
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