Toshiba Satellite P105 rebooting itself

[guitarzan]

I received a Toshiba Satellite P105 notebook from a client. After the notebook is turned on, a short time later the notebook reboots itself. First the screen turns white (kind of fades to white, a like plasma effect, if that makes sense), stays white for 3 seconds, then reboots itself.

If I log in and do nothing, it stays booted. If I browse the web, it stays booted. But it seems that almost anything else causes the reboot I described above. For example, even clicking Start > Programs and browsing through the folders(not even selecting anything!) causes a reboot.

BUT, none of these problems happen in Safe Mode!

When I received the machine, it was infected with enough malware that I backed up all the data and did a fresh reload using Toshiba's recovery CD, but the problem persists even with a clean load of XP. I figured maybe the CPU was overheating, so I opened the entire thing up (following the great instructions on this page:

http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/toshiba-satellite-p105/take-apart-1.htm),

removed the motherboard, and blew out some dust (not a lot there), put it back together and still no change.

I'm posting this in case someone has an opinion as to what could be causing this flaky behavior, and if anyone has additional troubleshooting suggestions. Thanks!

 

[kjv1611]

BUT, none of these problems happen in Safe Mode!

That makes it sound to me like some sort of unstable/missing driver issue. For that, you could boot into safe mode, and check device manager for any issues there.

You could try booting in safe mode, then going to the manufacturer's website, and looking for any driver downloads that could help - for one, the display driver. Another could be the wireless driver - I've seen bad wireless drivers really wreak havoc on laptops.

Also, just b/c you used a restore disk to restore the HDD to system defaults does not mean you would have removed all malware.

If the machine was badly infected, you should use DBAN from

http://www.dban.org,

or another similar formatting application. Once you use that, you can know for SURE that no malware is hiding on the hard drive. When DBAN is finished with a hard drive, nothing is left - not a thing. So, then you can start from scratch, and it's like it's a brand new drive! Okay, not literally like a new drive, but hopefully you get the point.

Also, before restoring the data back to the PC, you might be better off scanning that data with a couple security apps to be sure nothing got stuck in any of the backed-up files as well.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[guitarzan]

Thanks for the reply, kjv. Sound like good ideas.

I will check device manager and look for updated drivers next... The safe mode thing is what is confusing me, and faulty drivers could certainly explain why it works in safe mode and not normal mode... though, in theory the machine would have had this rebooting problem out of the box, and it didn't.

Regarding using DBAN, I believe the restore CD restores from an image, and reformats... I don't THINK it's possible that there is malware left on the machine... but it's worth a shot.

 

[BadBigBen]

I totally agree, that this is a driver issue, and I would look at the Display Driver as the culprit...

reason being that the symptoms described do not happen in SafeMode...

JFYI, as to REFORMATTING: most people falsely believe that formatting wipe drives (the data from the drive), but it actually just deletes the file pointers in the MFT, much like going to the library and taking out the catalog card and leaving the book on the shelf... that is the reason why you can use recovery software even after formatting a drive...

where as apps such as DBAN, overwrite the sectors with either random data or just nulls...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[guitarzan]

Thanks for the responses. I checked the video driver, there was a newer version (8.4.0.0 2/16/2006 to 8.4.0.0 r3 6/19/2006), but this didnt help.

Turns out that the owner of the notebook found out that it is still under warranty, so I will let someone else figure it out. I will post back what they tell me...

 

[kjv1611]

Sounds good, we'll be interested to find out what fixes the issue.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[guitarzan]

Amazingly, after two months and much frustration dealing with Geek Squad, they gave up and are offering my client a replacement laptop!