Switch on it grinds up, up pops the toshiba start screen that disappears after a second or two as it’s always done then nothing more happens. Always took a while to boot up but nowt now. Also when on the start screen tried pressing the f buttons to start in ? Mode and this does nothing either??

Hard drive dead? can you slave in a spare?

You say it grinds up. Does it really make a grinding noise?
Hard drives kaput, if so.

Have you tried all the ‘f’ keys? There’s usually a couple of boot options. Sometimes you need to hit them a few times to make sure you are pressing it at exactly the right time. If you can’t get to a boot menu then its possibly more fundamental than the hard drive. You could try booting from CD or USB. Make a USB linux boot disk on another computer (I suppose you have one if you posted here). If you can get to the RAM easily take out one stick or try each stick in each slot if it has two in there…. oh, and have you tried turning it off and on 🙂

SO it tries to boot then reboot back to the ‘start’?
You’ve tried the f5 safemode option and it does the same?

So the harddrive is still being recognised but not booting into Windows?
Corrupt copy of windows (if all the above hold true).

Either bang you recovery disc’s in & run em (don’t choose an option to do a clean install, you just need it recovered with wiping the data) or if you have the confidence (or a IT friend) take the drive out, run chkdsk on it (on another machine as a slave drive) and put it back in. This does fix the issue quite a lot of the time, if it doesn’t then there are way to fix it but unless you have some IT experience it maybe difficult and the recovery disc a more sensible option.

OR if you can pop the harddrvie into a another machine, grab your data and then just do a clean re-install, as this is alway the best option.

Z1ppy is correct, apart from the last six words.

why you no likey clean re-installs? 🙁

I “personnally” much prefer a clean install, than fix/clean out years of accumlated rubbish, but that’s me. 😉

Is there an error message?

If you get hold of Ultimate Boot CD you can use the hard drive diagnostic tools to see if the Hard Drive is in state mechanically. Ranish Partition Manager (also on UBCD) is a low level tool on there that will allow you to see what state the Master Boot Record and partitions are in. If the MBR is buggered Ranish will let you know with a warning message.

I would expect to see some sort of error message, what is it?

I agree with z1ppy, fresh install (if windows is monged). It does get itself in a right state sometimes. It never hurts to start with a fresh registry either.

why you no likey clean re-installs?

I didn’t say that, I just disagree that it’s “always” the best option. It’s a last resort.