When attempting to start, laptop will not boot. I have tried all the different combinations for accessing the BIOS, but nothing happens. The hard drive light does not blink. I even tried a brand new hard drive, hoping that SOMEthing would come up at least, but nothing happened. The fan starts, the wireless light comes on, the power lights are on and stay lit, but the hard drive never turns on. Is the laptop just dead? Help!

Your bios seems corrupted. You will probably need to reflash from a thumb drive which is bootable. The F2 should get you to booting screen to access the thumb drive to boot from to flash the bios.

During the boot process you will see on the screen to press a certain key to enter setup
Press and hold that key during the boot up process to enter BIOS you can load failsafe defaults or load optimized defaults ,press escape then press f10 to save to cmos to restart
or
During the boot process tap the f8 button three times this will boot into safe mode where the only things working will be your mouse and keyboard enabling you to attempt to repair your computer
hope this helps

Remember, there are many things you can do which will make your Windows installation as well as your laptop unstable, or even make it so it will not boot. Try to get into your bios. Different computers have different ways to get there - some have it on the screen, such as "hit delete key toenter bios" or "hit f12 to enter bios" or some other key combination. I think you enter the bios on your computer by pressing F10 repeatedly while booting. You should get to the setup screen. See if your hard drive is listed. You should see a hard drive as well as a dvd drive. If your drive is not listed, either someone has changed your setup so it is not the boot drive, or your drive may have gone bad. While you are in the setup, if it is not already the first choice, make your dvd (or cd) drive the first boot device. If it shows up, make the hard drive the second choice. Then when you boot, the Ubuntu should load. Try not to make any other changes, as you can make your laptop unuseable.

How are you attempting to enter the setup (BIOS)? Here are the steps:
Press the blue Access IBM button when the message "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue Access IBM button" is displayed to enter the ThinkVantage Productivity Center, then select Start setup utility to open the BIOS Setup Utility.

You need to go into the bios and set your computer cd as the first boot device. It will keep trying to boot from the hard drive until you do this.

Try getting to the bios screen, if you can get to the bios screen then I would imagine the hard drive has failed. If it is hanging up at the toshiba splash screen and not allowing BIOS access, then I would lean toward a motherboard failure. Are you attempting a boot from the windows disc?, is that why you are trying F12? I have seen my share of these Toshiba M35's just give the Toshiba splash screen when there has been a motherboard issue. Changing out the main board will fix this particular problem. I had not found another solution for it.

Hi,

You can get to the bios screen by tapping the F10 button while the system powers on. go to advance or system configuration to change the boor order

However there is a probability that the cd you are using or the hard drive had gone bad

Go to diagnostics under bios and run the HDD self test
try with a different recovery media

In HP notebooks there is a factory installed recovery console which you can access through tapping F11 which the system boots.

Regards,
Anup

if the processor was fried, it would not boot at all. i take it that you cannot get into bios? perhaps bios is currupt.

when you have the memory in and you boot up does it look like the hard drive LED is flashing? If so then its booting up into windows and that would mean a bad Display. If nothing happens then try a different stick of good RAM and see if it boots up then, if still nothing then it sounds like a bad motherboard.

Connect your external CDROM to the laptop. I think it is a USB CDROM. Enter your bios setup. In the boot device section, try to find any option which says First Boot Device -> USB CDROM. If you can set this things then the computer will be able to boot from your external cdrom.