My laptop is not detecting a bootable drive. The drive itself that it came with straight out of the box is detected in the bios, but once I try to boot it up, it can't detect Windows or something so it says I have to restart.
Check the boot priority. Check the drive to see if it actually has an OS on it.
It's a bit weird. In the bios it says there are 3 possible areas where HDDs and SSDs can be added but there are only 2 accessible from opening the back. if the OS is not on the HDD, either the mysterious 3rd drive area had the OS on it or the HDD that I can easily access got wiped somehow.
"it can't detect windows or something" is not very helpful, but if you say the exact message that maybe be helpful .
First it goes: Checking Media... Then: Checking Media [Fail] Then: Black Screen Then: No bootable device. Please Restart.
I was able to get a factory reset, but it blue screens, restarts and then goes to Automatic Repair and stays a blank screen.
Ok now we are going somewhere, does it have in bios a O.S. choice ? Can you post the actual model or reference of it ,its a storage problem i think, is ahci that its turned on in windows and off on the bios settings that might be the problem i think ,but it would not say "no bootable device" just blue screen at least in the computers that pass through me,check also the disk settings in bios . (you have to be patient some operations take time and the computer might seem it's not doing anything but it is,and some operations if you interrupt them you can wind up with a paper weight ).
Its the Toshiba P75-A7100. Right now it's still black screen and kind of scared to turn it off to get to the bios.
Does the hard drive LED on the laptop blink while booting? Do you hear grinding, clunking, clicking?
The "mystery drive" i would guess to be an mSATA, which could easily be confused with a LAN card... it would explain the issues if it was jostled and came out. Would be an issue to check.
Ok its a fairly new laptop , have you gone into the bios ?What options are there for the hard drive ?You can turn it off ,are doing something to it ?Does the drive have the windows on it?What does it say now ?Is it just black screen??See if there is a option saying "boot" and see what's on or off and post here or google every option on or off if you don't want to wait.
Gone into the bios. Not much options. There is secure boot which if I turn off gives me the options to change boot mode between UEFI and CSM Boot. Every time I boot, it goes blue screen, to preparing auto repair then stays black screen and I noticed there is no hard drive activity light so I can't really tell if it is really doing something or not.
Well, I found the issue of my problem, but brings up a lot larger problem. When it blue screen, but right before it goes into Automatic Repair, it says the issue is "unmountable boot volume" which means I need a copy of windows to recover it and the box the laptop came with doesn't have a single disc with it.
do you have another computer or a friend with a computer to download windows onto a usb drive?
Do you have access to another computer ??Try reading it on another computer to check if your disk is ok before you go buy another windows . Or try linux its free.
Here's the thing. My other system which is the family computer is a Mac. I might go with Linux for now until I can get a friend's help or a replacement.
Or anybody on here willing to give a copy through the internet somehow.
That's illegal and against the rules of the forum sorry i can't help you .
Read through the manual for you, it looks like you are up a creek if you did not create the recovery media, as it looks like there is not a recovery partition.
Just browsing over the posts, did you try safe mode?
Check to see the HDD is properly connected and not loose. If that doesnt work try swapping the HDD for another one with a copy of windows on it and see if it boots. If that works then your maybe hard drive has failed.