Vaio RC204 Desktop

[nick_pan]

Hi guys,

Big problem occured with my one year old vaio desktop. Keeping it brief, last weekend i was happily using my PC. Went to bed. Next morning.

Black Screen.

Reset my PC and all ive been getting is BOOT ERROR. Gone to my bios, no hard disks have been found. Put a Win XP cd in and can't reinstall windows cause yet again no hard disks have been found.

Ive taken the whole thing apart, investigated, and the hard disks seem to be spinning, are all connected on the motherboard, but they're not being recognised.

Is this hard disk failure?Im out of my guarantee so any advice greatly appreciated...

Regards,,

Nick

[Blencogo]

Hi Nick,

It sounds like the BIOS can no longer find the MBR or Boot.ini. This is often a hard drive failure but may just be a corrupt boot.ini.

Are you using the original Sony version of XP MCE operating system?
Have you made a set of Recovery Discs?
Is the Recovery Partition intact - have you ever reformatted the drives?
I presume you have not deleted any partitions recently?

The easiest way forward is to insert your Recovery System disc and boot from it. You can then recover drive C:\. However, you may want to try a repair first because a recovery will erase all programs/data/settings/updates installed since the Vaio was new.

If you want to try and repair the boot records, boot from a XP Pro installation CD and press R when you get to the 'Welcome to Setup' screen. This should take you to the Recovery Console where you can run the following boot repair commands: -

CHKDSK
FIXBOOT
FIXMBR

If you want to completely reinstall Windows, you are going to have to provide SATA/RAID drivers on a floppy disc to install by pressing F6 when you reach the 'Welcome to Setup' screen.