restarted during install

[Talsian]

Hi all. Was trying to install Ubuntu onto a fairly new Toshiba Satellite A305D-S6848 laptop. After about 40 mins in, the "installing system" screen was still at 0% and I thought the whole thing just wasn't working, so I powered off my computer after figuring there probably wasn't any other options. Turns out that was a dumb idea because the computer seems to just be a paper weight now. Turn it on and nothing happens at all. Any advice on how to begin fixing this?

Also is this normal for the install (the long wait for the first percent to be done) or was I just screwed at that point?

[taurus]

Was Ubuntu the only OS on that laptop or did you install it along with windows?

Can you boot your laptop with the LiveCD again?

[kestrel1]

It may have been formatting the hard drive, in which case turning off was not wise.
Are you able to boot to the live CD?

[Talsian]

Was trying to install a dual boot with XP. Can't reboot with live CD or the restore windows CD included with the computer. Pressing F2, delete, esc, or F12 does nothing shortly after starting up.

[Talsian]

oh wait, the OS wasn't XP it was Vista, slight error

[kestrel1]

So you are unable to get in to the BIOS? It sounds more like a hardware fault than anything. Maybe the keyboard has gone faulty. You may be able to check this if you have a USB keyboard to plug in. This may depend on the BIOS suporting USB keyboards of course.

[Talsian]

"So you are unable to get in to the BIOS? It sounds more like a hardware fault than anything. Maybe the keyboard has gone faulty. You may be able to check this if you have a USB keyboard to plug in. This may depend on the BIOS suporting USB keyboards of course."

The BIOS does not appear to be running. If the keyboard has gone faulty then I would hear the hard drive and processor running as per usual and the screen would show something, but all I get is blackness. Besides the DVD drive running for a little bit on startup or whenever I put a disk in there is little else that I hear, though the power lights are on. The BIOS appears to have been erased or severely corrupted to the point where I'm not even getting an error message. I'm assuming the first. I'm going to download the BIOS off of the Toshiba website and make a boot disk off of that. I'm sort of apprehensive about it because I have done this sort of thing using a floppy drive in the past, but I've never tried to do this sort of thing off of a dvd drive. Common sense tells me it should work, but we shall see. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this till tomorrow when I can get access to a windows machine since I'm on a mac now and the bios is on what appears to be a self extracting executable.

If there are any other thoughts on this, I'm all ears.

[kestrel1]

If you are gettiong nothing on the screen, it could just be the inverter has gone faulty for the screen. But if you are not seeing the hard drive light come on then it could be another part has gone faulty. If it is still under warranty I would send it for repair. Are you able to plug an external monitor in. If you get the screen up on that it is an inverter or screen fault.

[Talsian]

I'll have access to a monitor tomorrow. That could be possible.

[kestrel1]

At least if you get the screen up on an external monitor you will know if it is the laptops screen or inverter. When you switch the machine on & get real close to the screen, you may see something. If so, I would say it is possible that the inverter has gone.