Screen Goes Blank, Hard Drive Stuck, Cannot Re-Install, or recover

Question

I have somewhat a bizzar problem that even with several years of IT experience I seam not to be able to figure it out. I thought I toss it our here at Toshiba community in hopes of people's collective experience shedding some lights on my problem. 
I hava a 3 year old Toshiba Sattellite A305D with updated BIOS to version 2.10. It came with Windows Vista Home 32bit and I had upgraded it to Windows 7 64-bit last Christmas. It was working fine till last month that I started getting sporadic blank screens. Here is the symptome with details: screen goes blank, backlight it on, but there is no content on screen. At this time the Hard Disk Drive activity light is steady lit. Initially the problem happened intermitently and sometimes it fixed itself after few minutes and screen would come back on, but when it started to happen more often, I started to look for some troubleshooting. Some people suggested that blank screen could be due to bad lid close button being stuck or Windows power management's CPU power being set to 5%. I have tried cleaning the lid button and fixing power management but no luck. Then, I tried re-installing Windows from DVD, screen never went blank till after the first few steps of setup to the point that it says "Extracting Windows Files". At this time I started to think this is a hardware issue. I took out the RAM, I installed it on my MacBook Pro and used it for few days, and I had no problem. I even diagnosed them with Windows Memory Checker in the list of Recovery Options and no problem was detected. So, the next suspecious thing was the video card or display inverter. I tried connecting the laptop to an external monitor to test the screen's inverter, and same thing happened and external monitor went blank. I used Windows Recovery options and left it on that screen over night and nothing happened so I concluded the video card is fine. Next, I had turned off the Wifi and Lan, but nothing seamed to change, so I concluded those are OK as well. My last coclusion was that the hard drive is bad. I took the drive out and coonected it to my Desktop PC and ran disk utiility scan to check for bad sectors and none was detected. So, I thought the drive might be totally broken. I went to local electronics store and bought a brand new HITACHI SATA II drive and installed it. At first same thing happened so I gave up. Since I didn't have the recovery disks, I ordered recovery disks from Toshiba and tried that. Save thing happend and as soon as it started copying files, it blanked out. OK. So this time I ran a different recovery option and formatted the entire hard disk and zeroed out all sectors. That took approximately 3 days to finish for a 500GB brand new hard drive. Seams a long time.After that I could install Windows 7 64-bit from scratch up to the end. However, things got gorry again when I started installing Updates and driver packages. I had read about some problems with ATI drivers and Catalyst software with .NET updates, so I did not install any driver from update site and made sure all .NET updates are installed. I had to install the updates slowly chosing a few at a time. Otherwise same thing would happen. I got stuck to the point that I could not update anything. Windows files seamed to be corrupt and turning on/off Windows Features in controll panel was blank, so I had to re-install again. I did Re-install successfully using the upgrade option. This time I installed .NET updates first before any other updates. Then I started downloading all Toshiba drivers. Aazingly, the laptop worked for few ours without the symptom. I managed to install most of the drivers and updates including Value Added Package, HDD/DVD Rom Patch, Registry Patch, Sound, Modem, Atheros Wireless, and Catalyst. Up till now things were ok. Then I ran Toshiba Hardware update patch, and things got really messed up. Windows never booted again and symptoms showed right after boot tried to load WIndows. I tried recovery options but System restore kept getting errors too and I could not restore any more. Since Windows 7 Install and Windows Vistal recovery to Factory Default from recovery disk did not work, I thought maybe I should try Windows XP. So, I got a hold of my old Windows XP CD-ROM and I took a stab at it. Everything went fine till it started to copy windows files. This time symptom was different. I got one of those XP Blue Screen of deaths saying Hard Drive is bad and I must run chdsk /F. So, I concluded HDD is the problem. Ran CHDSK and no problem. I formated the drive again using DISKPART and the problem still exists. This is a brand new hard drive. What is the problem?

Answer 1

Please include your full model number when posting problems on the forums. It can be found on the bottom of your laptop. "A305D" is only partial.
That's quite the problem. How often was it doing this? At some steps in your diagnosing, it seemed to get better, but I wonder if it was actually (temporarily) fixed, or if it didn't occur by chance.
Unfortunately I don't have an answer for you. Normally I'd suggest you get it serviced, but then you'd also be throwing more money at a three year old notebook when clearly you're knowledgeable yourself.
Hopefully someone in the community will have some suggestions. I have noticed that some people shy away from posts with large paragraphs of text. (I'm not saying that's correct, but it happens.) I'd suggest putting some bullet points at the top summarizing. If you feel like doing that, you can edit your message.
Good luck!
- Peter