I came across a Toshiba Satellite A45 laptop, appears to be from about late 2003 loaded with Win XP.
I was told the CD/DVD drive was busted, and it had a virus at one point before it died; the user found the virus executable but accidentaly deleted every file on the machine starting with the letter "m"- don't ask me why. This has caused issues with the OS, which I can't attempt to repair or reload anyway with a busted CD drive. The drive will not open when pressing the eject button, ever. If I just let it boot up, I do get to a desktop screen and can move about folders, etc. Some functions like "add new hardware" do not respond.
I found a used CD/DVD drive on eBay which is supposed to be for this machine. Same model number, etc. I noticed on the label the busted drive I removed says M/S (like master/slave?) and the new used drive is marked "CSEL" not sure if that matters...every other marking and connection is the same. When I boot up the laptop with the new drive installed, it will immediately flash "IDE #1 ERROR" on a black screen, but I think the drive is o.k. because it will open now when hitting the eject button, etc.
Unfortuantely, I can't get the machine to recognize the drive, if I repeatedly press F1 and try to get to safe mode upon startup I can't, I can't get the machine to recognize a USB jump drive...the whole thing is kinda in la-la land.
Any thoughts or procedures you can think of that my help? If I have a straight Windows XP disc in the drive when I power up, the light on the CD drive flashes for a few seconds but it doesn't read the XP disc.
It also has a user and an admin account if that helps.
Thanks!