Toshiba L305-S5957 won't boot from CD

[Harry Kuhman]

There seem to be two (potentially related) problems in the same thread here. GTIMESTWO, you didn't say what burning software you used, but a high speed burn is almost certainly the cause of your problem. My advice is to find an alternate burning package that will do a low speed burn. The low speed burn is even more important than the option to do a verification pass. Also, be sure not to skip the md5 check, and be sure that you are burning the iso as an image and not just copying the iso file to a CD.

Winxpuser50, you bought a disc; I'm not sure where nor do I care. I do suspect that someone selling discs does not take the extra time to do a high quality low speed burn. You might be able to resolve your problem just by downloading and burning your own copy at low speed. I would also suggest downloading a different version than the disc that you bought, just in case there is some version related issue. When that works you can download the iso for the version you already bought, burn that, and determine if there was a problem with the version or just with the media.

[winxpuser50]

thanks for the info about the disc...it well could be the slow vs. fast burn problem, but unfortunately I don't have access to another system to burn discs. I asked a tech friend of mine to burn a Win XP boot disc but he refused saying he didn't want to potentially mess up my system, as he apparently had one time when he burned a disc for a friend that was a bad download. I feel he has the right not to want to do that so I didn't push it. I don't want to borrow a relative's computer to burn a disc either, for the same reason, don't want to mess up their system or settings, so burning discs is not an option for me. If it had been I would have made a Win XP boot disc at the get go when my computer stopped working rather than buying a disc. Whatever the cause, the Knoppix disc did not work, and I tend to agree that it's the disc and not my CD drive that's at fault. At CNET forum they said they'd used Knoppix to boot many Toshibas over the years so they didn't think it was an incompatability issue between my machine and the disc. I have the latest version of knoppix. So, it seems my only solution now is to pull the drive and transfer the data to a new drive. I'm out of ideas. The bottom line was of course to rescue my data and I still want to do that and will try to do that. I'm not blaming Knoppix at all, just trying to figure this out. I tried booting up in all kinds of ways....a cold boot with the CD in the drive, setting it to start CD first in the bios, starting and restarting..etc. It simply won't boot up the system from the disc. It was interesting to me that I did note a couple of smudges on the disc (small from fingerprints) which I wiped off....whoever handled it in packaging wasn't being particularly careful to hold it properly as I do with all my own CD's...I cleaned it and it made no difference so it's something more than a smudge or two preventing the disc from being read. Thanks again...if anyone has further info, it would be appreciated!