2 Queries - sound, & back up using cmd prompt

[too_much]

Hi all

Two queries if I may, sort of rolled in to one.

My other half's dad's Tosh Satellite lappy crashed last week, with some horrendous noise coming from the speakers which can only be described as constant feedback. As in if you put a mic to a speaker, that sound. Really loud, really constant.

Ctrl+alt+del no joy, wouldn't shut down, closing it did nothing, wouldn't do a hard reset, nothing. Had to take the battery out. When he tried turning it back on, it now either bluescreens halfway through booting (you can see the windows loading screen for a few seconds) or stalls and makes that horrific noise again.

Now, I've tried system restore (no restore points available), startup recovery said "nope, it won't boot" but wouldn't acknowledge why; tried just about everything else short of a reformat and no joy.

My questions are as follows:

I'm assuming the bootup sequence or whatever it's called, was corrupted by the battery coming out while it was in windows. Does that sound reasonable?

Secondly, this sound issue - does it sound like hardware to you? I'm kinda hoping it's just a borked sound driver file or something, which a repair install type thing would fix.

Third, I think the best solution would be to use the recovery disks to restore the HDD to its original state - I hope this would work anyway. But I need to back up the contents of the hard drive to an external drive... can I do this just using the normal command prompt thing at boot?

Does anyone have a link to a guide on how is easiest to do this? I googled a few search strings but found nothing directly useful and I really could do with not screwing this up.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated

thanks
Matt

[Train]

What happens when you plug in the AC?

May have to DBAN the drive and start from scratch, had power failure scramble drives and that is what it took to be able to reinstall Windows.

[too_much]

Hi mate

If the AC is in, the noise continues even when the battery is out. Very frustrating!

Just googled DBAN and looks reasonable - could I then reinstall windows from the recovery disks, even on a completely wiped drive? Obviously I'd rather keep it legal - it's still under warranty though so if I could back up the contents he could always just switch it at the retailer.

Would I still be able to back up the contents?

thanks
Matt

[too_much]

Sorry for double post, I was a bit too late to edit!

I've been looking at HD clone tools online - would it be worth getting one that has a command prompt version, and just backing up everything to external HDD, then blitzing the drive and reinstalling windows? Presumably then I could just restore the files I wanted from the cloned image... would that work? If so can you recommend any programs as there's a lot of them!

thanks again, I really appreciate your advice

Matt

[Train]

Do you have another computer available?

This is what I use. Love it too!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-002-_-Product

[Train]

Remove the hdd, then with the ac plugged in see if it will shutup and boot to a boot cd.

May have to set the bios for the cd rom to be before the hdd though.