Am I overreacting? Is Toshiba support really not that evil?

[Dougmeister]

* Toshiba Satellite U845-S406 Ultrabook
* Windows 7
* 1 year, 4 months old
* BSOD a few minutes after boot up
* Complains about iastor.sys (see attachment)
* Can't do a system restore or even a factory reset without same error popping up
* Boot to safe mode, ran "chkdsk c: /r" and it locks up (see attachment #2)

Warranty ended mid October 2013. A serious problem like this, and they won't cover it.

Go ahead. Tell me to stop whining, suck it up, and fix it myself.

 

[Matt1970]

I hear ya, but you are 4 months out of warranty.

 

[ArisVer]

These might help.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...computer/50b7af63-bb89-4cf4-8bab-671dd12a4751

http://www.file.net/process/iastor.sys.html

Otherwise take it to the local shop or Toshiba.

 

[Matt1970]

He could give that a try, but lockups running chkdsk pretty much tell you the drive is on it's way out.

 

[Virgorising]

He could give that a try, but lockups running chkdsk pretty much tell you the drive is on it's way out.

Is true. Is also PATHETIC. I mean it.... in my observation, the newer the hardware in most (non business systems), the more sleazoid.

Bet if we made a proper graph reflecting accurate data, the incidents of RMAing this and that for those still under warranty in recent years, would be at a 60 degree angle.

Or steeper.

 

[Steltek]

* Toshiba Satellite U845-S406 Ultrabook
* Windows 7
* 1 year, 4 months old
* BSOD a few minutes after boot up
* Complains about iastor.sys (see attachment)
* Can't do a system restore or even a factory reset without same error popping up
* Boot to safe mode, ran "chkdsk c: /r" and it locks up (see attachment #2)

Warranty ended mid October 2013. A serious problem like this, and they won't cover it.

Go ahead. Tell me to stop whining, suck it up, and fix it myself.

Stop whining! Suck it up! Fix it yourself! (just doin' what you told me to... ).

Seriously, though, pretty much all of the big box sellers are like this. Every once in a while I've been able to get a sympathetic Dell support CSR to fudge a little, but has never been more than a few days, certainly not more than 30 (and that was a one time thing back during "throttlegate" era). In my experience, the hard drive is always the most likely laptop component to fail, followed by batteries and chargers.

One thing I suggest that you do, if you don't already have one, is to get a credit card like AMEX Blue which doubles manufacturer warranties up to 12 months at no cost and buy all of your electronics on it. I had the exact same thing to happen back in November to an HP laptop that I'd bought my niece for Christmas about 18 months ago. The hard drive died, and the battery started going bad. AMEX refunded the entire cost of the laptop to me and then told me to do whatever I wanted to with the defective laptop (the AMEX CSR literally told me to fix it if I wanted, they didn't care). All with a claim submitted via Internet and one phone call (about 10 minutes total time invested). $70 later for a hard drive and an OEM battery (could have done it cheaper, but bought a faster 7200rpm drive), a Windows reinstall, and my niece had her laptop back and I had an extra $375 credit on my credit card to help pay for Christmas this year on Black Friday.

In short, I have been buying all of my electronics on my AMEX card for years now. I've never once carried a balance (pay it off at the end of each month) and they haven't cared a whit.

 

[Matt1970]

Is true. Is also PATHETIC. I mean it.... in my observation, the newer the hardware in most (non business systems), the more sleazoid.

Bet if we made a proper graph reflecting accurate data, the incidents of RMAing this and that for those still under warranty in recent years, would be at a 60 degree angle.

Or steeper.

I wouldn't be so sure. 15 years ago there weren't just brands that were unreliable, there were brand you could almost count on dying. Quantum Bigfoot, Cyrix, believe it or not Samsung picture tubes, and quite a few more. Now a lot of things are so reliable that they just incorporate them into the motherboard, like network and sound cards, and not even give them a second thought. I just had a bad onboard video on an intel board here but I can't remember the last bad sound or Ethernet.

 

[dbk]

My girlfriends laptop just did the same thing yesterday. Blue Screen with an iastor.sys error. Could not even boot up in any of the safe modes. What I did after spending 16 hours trying to find a solution to this problem and reading endless posts that didn't help me at all was download a Windows 7 repair disk, because hers did not come with one. Running the option their did not help anything either. Finally I researched the Bcdedit commands to see what my option were being unfamiliar with windows 7 and found enough information to aid me in fixing it. Hey, still a big XP fan! Finally I booted from the disk and selected the command prompt option then all I did was type two lines.

Type the correct drive letter for your computer c: or d: etc., Then type

Bootrec.exe /FixMbr 'press enter'

Bootrec.exe /FixBoot 'press enter'

found from googling

 

[Matt1970]

That's not a master boot record problem. At least not one I have ever seen. If it was the MBR you would see a message like "Operating System not found".

 

[ArisVer]

The file is an Intel RAID/AHCI driver. It probably has gone missing, corrupted or infected.

 

[styrafoam]

I would definitely exhaust the rootkit route before moving on, running tdss killer and combofix from safe mode. If you don't get any results there move on to the SSD itself. I'm assuming that the laptop uses intel's smart response to utilize an SSD as a cache drive. My guess is the SSD is giving up. I would try using the srt config utility, in safe mode if need be, and disable the SSD cache to see if the problem goes away. This will probably make the laptop feel much slower so if this happens to work you may want to consider replacing the SSD. Should turning off the cache be effective you may also want to ask for help on the memory and storage forum,I must confess that my hands on ssd know how is pretty low.