sony pcg71212m stops while loading windows 7, hdd suspect, anyone else had this problem?

[ivowtobuyagain]

a friend has a sony viao, pcg71212m

which stops while loading windows 7, leaving a logo of the dove on the screen,

after a while a check system box appears and attempts to confirm cause of problem,

i transferred hdd to a usb drive caddy to see if data could be rescued,

the recovery and data partitions of the drive are recognized, as drive f: and drive g:

the drive is a hitachi sata 500gb 2.5inch type,

but no information about the drive contents can be seen,

the hard drive at this point can be heard making a continual soft chirping sound, like a cricket,

i suspect the drive electronics or a bad disk sector,

it seems strange because the machine is only 13months old,

any suggestions as to what to do are most welcome,

thanks for taking time

[Blencogo]

You will need to find the correct model type.  You are quoting a chassis type which can be shared by several very different models.  Have a look on the screen surround and try to find the correct model - it will be something like VPCEB1M1E or similar.

When you have the model, you can check if the Vaio is still within warranty.  These models usually have only a 12 month warranty but some models have 24 months.

It sounds like the disc is faulty and will need replacement - it is unusual to delelop a fault after 13 months, unless it has received a knock.

Did your friend make a set of Recovery Discs as instructed during initial setup and follow up reminders produced subsequently?  If so, you can use the Recovery Disc to reinstall the original factory setup on a new drive and copy what data you can recover from the old drive.

If your friend did not make Recovery Discs, the path ahead is much more difficult and costly.

[kronos007]

Hope I am not too late, I know whats happend to your laptop.

Could be that the Partition Table has been lost, I have found this to happen on quite a few laptops running Windows 7 and Vista. I think its a possible fault in windows when something goes wrong closing down.

In this case the partiton table cannot always be recovered and have to have a data recovery ran over the drive to pull back anything important (Recommend an external backup drive so you always have a backup so you dont need a recover).

Then a clean install of Windows should get you up and running again. Recommend (even if not a seagate hard drive) download 'seatools for windows' via seagate website (its free program), and test SMART and DST. If they dont fail your hard drive should be ok. If fail then your got a faulty hard drive.

You can test the hard drive with sea tools even in its faulty state if auto detected in BIOS. If windows comes up saying format drive? say no. Drive must be attached directly to a SATA port not in a USB Enclosure or connector as test wont work properly.

Hope this helps, if not hope it helps someone else. Note this problem applys to majority if not all laptops in this type of fault it is not limited to the model or make!

ice_win007@hotmail.com if you need more help and advise.

Sorry I didnt see this problem earlier else I would of replied.

[nikkilim]

"the hard drive at this point can be heard making a continual soft chirping sound, like a cricket,"

This sounds like a hardware(HDD) issue to me. If you have successfully recovered the files, try to reload the OS and I would check the warranty on this. Hopefully, it could replaced.