Yeah, I think this drive is borked. Here's some other info I didn't share earlier.
A. When I tried to "refresh" the PC, not wipe out all the data, it told me the drive was locked. I googled some advice that indicated that maybe the hard drive wasn't the problem, UEFI settings and so forth, so I pressed on.
B. The "10 Minutes" for utilities to come up is the combination of time to get to the advanced troubleshooting screens, then... likely another 5 minutes for Command Prompt to come up
C. I tried "Resetting" the PC, wipe out all the data and start fresh. That's actually what I was in the middle of last night, got bored waiting for a prompt. It told me "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing." This after Diskpart told me the 10GB recovery partition is Healthy (?).
Here are my stopwatch results, first withOUT the hard drive
1. Power on, watch Toshiba logo until I'm told to press a key to boot to DVD = 52 seconds
2. Press key, Toshiba logo again, until the Windows screen comes up asking for my region = 59 seconds
3. Click on Next, no wait. Then click on Repair Your Computer link, then options available = 3 seconds. Noting that there are only two options available: power off and troubleshoot. Reasonable since there's no hard drive
Results WITH compromised hard drive
1. :52 seconds, same
2. Total of 2:38. There's:59 seconds of Toshiba, then the screen goes dark for 1:39 until I get my region/next button option
3. 4:30 until I get troubleshooting options.
4. Advanced/Command Prompt (not available without HD): 2:28. So I wasn't far off at 9 minutes total, and it probably took a couple more minutes to get any data out of diskpart.
So Drive = Borked, IMHO
The reason I came calling here though, is that :52 and :59 seems like a really long time for me to be staring at a manufacturer splash screen. Is that normal for Toshiba? Or UEFI stuff in general is just that pokey? Thanks!