Hardrive retired on me

[Pjay]

Hi guys

Does anyone know how to go about re-loading the OS/Drivers/Apps on the PCG-R600HFP I just had the drive go tits up so replaced it with a new 40gb. I have all the 5 disks. but dont have firewire cdrom. I have usb cdrom but theres no boot option in the bios for usb. Can it be done.

Pjay

[kee-lo_]

If you could make a bootdisk so it finds the USB CD-ROM then sure it can be done.

[Pjay]

Thanks Kee-Lo
But theres no floppy drive on this model...I think I might of found the solution for it now, I hope anyway. I visited vaio-link.com and found this page it says

If you cannot read from a CD in DOS:
1 Start your VAIO and wait until you are back at the Windows desktop.
2 Copy the contents of the supplied (first) Recovery CD (1/2) - If your recovery requires two recovery CDs, copy the file sony.I01 to your secondary partition.
3 Restart your VAIO in DOS.
4 At the prompt, type the drive letter for your secondary partition drive (e.g. G:) and press ENTER.
5 Type cd sony and press ENTER.
6 Type the command: restorer 1:1 ¿f F:\sony.img and press ENTER - The system recovery process starts immediately.

Now The Idea is this: I do this

1 connect the brand new laptop drive to my main pc as the master on the Primary using a ide lead convertor, and the cd rom on the secondery as master.
2 Use fdisk to partion the drive so I got C&D
3 Load Win98se (barebones) to C drive (just tempory so I can get into dos to load XPpro off the restore cds)
4 Copy the contents of all the Recovery CDs to the secondary partition D
5 Restart the VAIO in DOS.
6 At the prompt, type D press ENTER.
7 Type cd sony and press ENTER.
8 Type the command: restorer 1:1 ¿f D:\sony.img and press ENTER

Me Kinda hopes this will start the system recovery process going, I would like it confirming before I start doing it tho.

...............I may be way off track here put me right if so..........

Pjay

[kee-lo_]

I guess you could take this route, but why do you want to do the restoring on the desktop, wouldn't it be better to do it on the notebook after you have copied the disks over?

[Pjay]

Im just using the desktop to load it with win98se partition and load all the restore cd's to. then put it back into the vaio to do the rest, sorry I didnt say that earlier.

Cheers
Pjay

[kee-lo_]

Ah I see
Good luck with that.
But I would have thought you'd want NTFS partitions.

[Pjay]

Im glad u said that I will convert the drive to ntfs before i stick it back into the lappy. cheers Ke-lo

Pjay

[kee-lo_]

No problem

[Pjay]

Well it took me a while to get round to doing it but it all worked out just fine...:smileygrin: .....cheers

Pjay

[kee-lo_]

Cool

Love the avatar btw