Toshiba Satellite p35-s611 Shows bios no post & Black Screen with curs

This is my first post here, but I've read through and found some good advice here in the past couple years.

Anyway, I bought a Toshiba Satellite p35-s611 Laptop second hand with problems. It's complete but with only 512mb or ram. Cd rom works fine, I believe the hard drive does too, and the also the wireless card is inside and the power lights and fan all turn on fine. I havn't heard a single beep from the machine.

The problems I've found so far have been the inability to see anything but the flash of an option to view the bios by pressing f2 then it goes straight to a black screen and has a small gray underscore cursor which I can't use. After a while sitting there the computer will shut off.


I tried:

installing windows xp which the system starts but then fails to setup halfway through the initial files.

returning the bios settings to default

the included "recovery and applications disc made for this system which shuts off abrubtly after around 20% loads.

reinstalling the bios "1.40" (No improvement or extra fucnctions from this.)

switching to a known working hard drive.

running the laptop without the battery (as I wasn't sure if it was the loose ac plug making the system shut down abruptly)

switching the ram from one slot to another

testing the original drive via usb cable under my laptops vista OS (I couldnt view the contents without using a program although I could see the drive in disc manager and device manager.) Probably just some sort of a compatibility issue although it said something like Can't access disc f: corrupt/read error. *Once again take in mind I had all the same problems with the drive I know is working fine.*

Hopefully someone has dealt with this before and give me a couple tips.


Thanks in advance.