Sometimes repairs stop being about a quick fix and become a vendetta. This is one of those instances.
Recently, a Toshiba Satellite L305 was given to me for repair. The OS had been accidentally removed, but the person had the Vista 32-bit recovery disks. I figured no problem, I can do this in a hour. Well, the recovery went find until disk 2 went into the recovery process and hit about 30%. I received a 10-FC12-0017 error. A search of the net found nexperts (net experts) divided between bad recovery disks or bad hard drive.
The hard drive wasn’t acting or sounding bad. Plus ,my friend had said the only reason she ran the recovery disks originally was because the touchpad wasn’t working. It’s ok to laugh. I assumed the HDD was fine since she didn’t complain of operating issues. So I figured it was the recovery DVD’s, as they had some serious scratches on them even after I cleaned them.
The L305 had a 64-bit processor so I figured, let me try my OEM 64-bit Vista disk. It actually installed fine with no errors. However, I had no valid product code and the product key on the bottom wasn’t validating. So I knew I had to use the recovery disks.
Toshiba has quite a racket with these recovery disks. It’s $25 for a new set. I wasn’t about to go that route.
I booted freedos off a CD and made sure all the partitions on the drive wiped before attempting a new recovery, With a raw drive, I attempted the recovery again, using the recovery disk to setup the partitions. It failed again.
At this point I was frustrated. I also think Vista sucks. I re-wiped the drive with freedos and attempted an install of windows 7 32-bit. It is what I had laying around. It failed with a “cannot install on this hardware error.”
At this point I knew something was up. I then ran CHKDSK on the drive and it took damn near 8 hours to complete. I ran the recovery and it failed again.
So extremely frustrated, I put a spare SATA drive in it, and ran the Vista recovery disks.
After about 14 hours of attempted recovery, the OS came to life. So error 10-FC12-0017 on a Toshiba recovery, is a bad hard disk. Save yourself the trouble and just replace the HDD.
What is most frustrating about this is the touchpad never did work, it was bad. The owner opted for an external mouse instead of paying to fix it. It didn’t work during the recovery. That should have been my clue that more hardware (like the HDD) could be damaged.
And that is one of the lessons I learned. The other lesson is, check the disk before running a recovery (something I normally do anyway for computers I don’t know the drive’s history). The third lesson is never detour from your usual practices because you are doing a favor for someone.
I hope someone finds this helpful.
Also, if you aren’t reading this at http://beavmetal.blogspot.com, you should be.
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