Problem: "Toshiba Satellite A300" shuts-down hard during boot-up.

Problem with "Toshiba Satellite A300". Shuts down hard during bootup.

• Some extra details:

Bios  1.70 of 11/24/2008
Ram 3GB
Satellite A300 PSAGCE-0c500wce

• Problem:

As of 2025, the battery completely died more than a year ago.
With or without it inserted, the computer boots up, but right after the Windows logo appears, it shuts-down, consistently.

• Some troubleshooting:

If I enter in the BIOS, I can stay there, change settings, and the computer runs fine.

I tried to boot up from some linux-live-usb distributions. I was surprised to see that with some it would work, with others the same problem would appear.

This would happen with and without the HD attached to the computer. I thought the HD could be causing the failure.

I narrowed it down to the boot parameter  "acpi=off". With it in the kernel parameters of the boot process, the linux would boot up without problems.

• My guess:

When Windows/Linux tried to communicate with the BIOS to get ACPI information, whatever the 'dead-or-missing-battery' was responding/not-responding was causing the computer to shut-down.

Maybe it was not designed-and-tested to work with no battery.

Maybe this problem is fixed with a BIOS update (it has never been updated on that laptop), however there is a problem... Toshiba website and support for this model is gone. There are BIOS updates out there, but not from Toshiba. So you either play the cards or not.

• Workaround

Knowing how to successfully boot Linux I looked for a similar way on Windows. It is the "Rescue Mode". Just press F8 repeatedly right after pressing the power-button. It will instruct Windows (W7 I believe it was) to give you a menu and choose what to load.

I returned the laptop to my friend with instructions on how to boot in that way.

• Misc

Luckily it didn't have any of the many other problems that Model can have (I researched a lot).

I also learnt about about  https://www.hirensbootcd.org

It is like a Linux-live-usb but with Windows. Unfortunately I didn't find the way to prevent it from talking to the ACPI so within seconds/minutes of booting it would cause the shutdown. But it is good to know it is there if you need to update the BIOS and you require a Windows for that (because the vendor gives you a .exe ) and you don't have a Windows around.

Hope it helps others.