How can I bypass the boot agent on a Toshiba laptop

I have a Toshiba A105-S4384 laptop with winXP and it can't get past the PXE boot agent when it boots up. The boot agent ends with "can't find an operating system". My reading says that the PXE is looking for a network server, but that is part of the problem - there are no network drivers and the internet is unreachable. How can I bypass PXE so I can boot into the recovery mode and restore the computer?

I do not have the original recovery disk and the BIOS has no PXE control options and no PXE boot sequence option.

Thanks for your help.

 

https://www.question-defense.com/20...-boot-agent-ge-which-displays-client-mac-addr

read through above and then if that does not help, the below google search page might help:

https://www.google.com/search?q=pxe.....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.273....0.GoCQoZyxPIM

 

Thank you Elizabeth -

Unfortunately none of that stuff has worked the way I have tried it (the underline means it's quite possible I didn't do it correctly) because:

1. There are no options in the bios to control PXE booting.

2. When ever I try the ctrl-S or ctrl-0 shortcuts during boot, the PXE runs but locks up because it can't find an operating system image and I can't get past it. The only way I can get it to unlock is to re-install a regular (non-Toshiba) version of winXP and start over eventually with the same result.

3. I have not been successfull installing and running the current Intel preboot utility because either a) it seems not to run in winXP32 or b) when it's run from safe DOS mode it reports the OS isn't supported.

This is obviously complex and it is rapidly approaching my technical the upper limit. What I'm persuing now are refinements of item three above. Maybe the utility will run in a third party DOS environment, but Im not optimistic because of the prior OS error message. Maybe spoofing the DOS version would work. I need to find out more about the Intel utility.

All this would be much easier if there were a way or utility to build a recovery disk directly fron the HDDRECOVERY partition. The ctrl-0 method is supposed to do that, but... see number 2 above.

The circle keeps getting bigger. Your suggestions are appreciated. Thanks for your help.

 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...005840/network-and-i-o/ethernet-products.html

on this page the last version to support xp is version 18.3

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can you boot to a rescue disk such as Hiren's??

your bios should have an option to boot from either a usb or a cd, you will have to download hiren's iso and burn to a flash drive with rufus ( I use version 1.20) or burn to a cd with imgburn.

you can use hiren's to view your disk and also to run the intel program from a flash drive.

 

Good thought. Yes I have all that stuff and will try it tomorrow. I am, however, finding conflicting information on the Intel PRO/100 ve adapter. One page I found on the Intel web site said that if the adapter is embedded on a motherboard like a laptop (instead of a separate NIC), the only way to modify the boot agent's behavior is by modifying the laptop's bios firmware. I hope not. We'll see.

 

okay, will check back

some firmware updates are available, on some pcs.

 

Well, that was an interesting exercise. I spent all yesterday learning how to make a flash drive bootable, installing Hiren's on it, installing BootUtil on it, figuring out Hiren's directory structure and figuring out how run a program in Hiren's.

To be safe I tried to save the current NIC firmware first:

C:\bootutil -NIC=1 -FILE=nicFW -SAVEIMAGE

...and got:

Port Network Address Location Series WOL FLASH Firmware
---- ---------------- -------- ------ --- ---------------
1 00A0D153 7:08 0 10/100 N/A FLASH not present

That didn't work. I guess PXE really must be in the BIOS on a laptop (and I am using the latest available BIOS) . Oh, well.

 

Ok. Now it's booting up okay and I know of no reason why. It must be either just one of those MS things that happens on its own or because it was shut off over night.

Now that leaves me with the original problem I was trying go solve when PXE raised its ugly head. I need to restore the laptop to the original XP DOS from the HDDRESTORE directory, but I don't have the original Toshiba (Satellite A105-S4384) recovery disk. Ctrl-0 was supposed to do that, but it doesn't seem to. Any ideas?

 

It's locked up in PXE again. A Toshiba page said if you want to restore the factory OS, hold down "0" when you turn the computer on. I did and it locked up again.

Edit: Ok here's what was happening. Ctrl-S, ctrl-0 and holding "0" down while turning the laptop on ended up triggering the PXE boot manager. Somehow in that process the boot drive "C:" was being set as inactive; therefore, if no OS was found in the boot sequence, PXE was triggered. Looking at it with DiskDirector found the problem and fixed it.

I'm back to the original problem. - restoring the OS from the HDRECOVERY partition.

Elizabeth: thanks for your help.
Ron

 

https://neosmart.net/wiki/toshiba-recovery-disk/

above has instructions on how to do this through windows, or how to do this when unable to boot

 

Thanks, but that recommends the "hold '0' and turn on the laptop" method that deactivated the harddrive and sent us into the PXE.

 

from hiren's run checkdisk with the /r parameter, sometimes must be run twice until no errors are found (depending on size of hd will be a lengthy process, and then run fixmbr and fixboot.

 

I really appreciate your continued help. Let me give you some history. This laptop was updated to WIN7 and then WIN10 1607. When I tried to update it to 1703 a number of drivers failed to install. I then returned it to 1607. Because I wanted to start completely clean I wanted to return it to the factory software, but I couldn't find the original or the recovery disks so I installed a version of XP Professional I happened to have lying around. And that's what's on the system now. Do you think anything in that process has affected the ability to reinstall the original system? I do know that the XP Professional I used does not have any "restore your system" menu items on the setup screens during bootup. That could also account for why the "hold down '0'" doesn't work.

 

generally when a drive is formatted to install a new OS, any partition may get wiped also.So you may not have a recovery partition.

was xp the original OS on this pc??

I am getting out of my depth here, the one and only thing left that I can think of is to flash the bios with an earlier version , first to see if it gets it back to a regular boot option and then to flash again with the latest bios version to bring it up to date, but if the latest version brings about the error I would stay with the earlier version of the bios.

 

XP Media Edition was the delivered OS. Both the SYSTEM and HDDRECOVERY appear to be still intact. I'm going to try your last suggestion, but I'm backing up all 3 partitions first. I also found two programs on the net that profess to be "genuine" Toshiba Recovery Media Creator programs. We'll see. IS'NT THIS FUN!!

 

lots and lots of fun

 

You would make a good flight instructor. You make people learn by experience and thinking for themselves. There is no program named checkdisk and fixmbr and fixboot cannot be found unless Recovery Console is installed.

Results: Chkdisk found no problems. Fixmbr found a non-standard mbr and cautioned against replacing it. Now being nervous, research found that replacing a laptop mbr or boot record from a non-laptop CD could be a problem so I didn't do it.

For now I'm swamped with other things so I have to park this project until later next week. Thank for sticking in there.

 

you can use hiren's to boot to mini xp mode, and use command prompt to run checkdisk and fixmbr and fixboot, do not worry about the warning, I have run these myself, after I installed linux as a trial, I could not get it to go back to regular boot after ditching linux and going back to xp, without running fixmbr and fixboot.

 

To verify: This was on a three partition laptop one being the recovery partition?

Question: Are fixmbr and fixboot from the Mini XP installation or the hard drive installation?

 

when you are in mini xp, choose command prompt, then type in

chkdsk c: /r for checkdisk, where c: is the drive you want checked.

fixmbr C:

fixboot c:

run each above from command prompt. within hiren's mini xp