I am trying to do a system reinstall from a DVD recovery disk for a a Toshiba A65 Satellite laptop. I follow the instructions given which is to hold the "C" key until the screen reads Toshiba. The screen then goes in to the windows XP screen and then eventually the machine shuts off. It then restarts itself and goes to a screen requesting a restart in "safe" "last known good configuration" or "start normally". Any selection of the above does not work and the machine falls into a loop of restarting doing the same above steps. Can any one help on this. Thank you.

Did you check Toshiba's site?

I found this:

http://209.167.114.38/support/techs...

Life's more painless for the brainless.

I hope you didn't wipe the drive clean before trying the install. If you did, you probably wiped out the hidden restore partition.
You might have to check the Toshiba web site for instructions on how to restore to a new hard drive.

I was unable to find anything at the web site.
I did not wipe the drive clean prior to trying the install. Is it possible that I picked up something from the internet since the machine worked fine prior to that. During that time the laptop just shut down, then this problem began when I tried to start it up.

Are you using the Toshiba Recovery Disk or a DVD created from the Laptop?

Check the Bios (F2 on Toshiba screen) to ensure "Boot From CD" is first in the Boot order and be sure to leave the Media in the Optcal Drive when the system restarts.

The message you are getting indicates that the Laptop is trying to Boot from the HDD.

There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

Dumbob,
I think your getting me there.
I pressed F-2 on start up.
I got a "Check system then press F-1" message.
Pressed F-1 and went to the small boot sequence screen and changed it from HDD to CD-rom drive.
I saved and the machine restarted and is booting to the recovery disk but still recycles. A blue screen pops up that did not pop up before and a message about booting to th e CD flashes for a second. The machine then recyles into the same screens again.

The A65 does not use a restore partition. It appears the problem might be in reading the DVD during boot. Try going to BIOS and changing the boot order so the optical drive is the first boot device and the hard drive is second. This will start the system straight into the DVD without pressing any keys. Another method is that during the initial LOGO screen there is a notice about selecting the device for boot at that point and picking the DVD drive. This model needs a Recovery disk to recreate the system on the drive. The startup and not getting the start of the recovery process is what indicates possible optical failure. I have seen this before when doing Toshiba recoveries with bad drives.

Richard

Look closely at the Toshiba logo when then LCD first turns on after powering on.
If you see any 'oddities' (speckles, lines, etc), you may have bad onboard memory, which often causes a reboot cycle both in windows and in the recovery DVD. If this is the case, it can be fixed (by manually removing the onboard memory), but it's not for the un-geeky. :) Of course, if this is the case, everything else is moot until you get it fixed.

Also, you need to hold down the C key until you see a message along the lines of 'Checking boot media' for CD/DVD boot...Holding it just until the Toshiba logo shows isn't long enough.

Last, but not least, in safe mode, go to start menu, Run, type in CMD and hit enter (aka open a command prompt). Now, type chkdsk /r c: and hit enter. It will ask you if you want to check the disk on the next reboot. Answer Yes. Reboot and wait..wait some more...you should see the check disk process running. If it reboots, or requires a reboot, you had errors on the filesystem.