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VGN-NR10E/S - Will not install any OS

Dilla
Visitor
May 2008
May 2008

VGN-NR10E/S - Will not install any OS

Greetings, a new Vaio user here. Although a good technical background and understanding.

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-NR10E/S it came pre-installed with Vista. Vista was giving too many errors and I wanted to roll it back to XP. I backed up all data, music etc... downloaded the drivers from the Vaio support site. Then proceeded to Install XP. I deleted all partitions on the hard drive, at the time not-knowing about the restore partition on the drive.
The XP installation did not succeed. I took the drive out and plugged it into my PC - I was able to successfully install XP this way, I then went to put the hard drive back into my laptop and to my dismay, the laptop told me it couldn't find the hard drive. I cannot re-install Vista, as for some reason the laptop won't boot from the Vista CD I have.
I thought the problem maybe related to the hard drive - so I purchased a similar drive, with matching specs. Put this new HD in the laptop, tried installing XP and I end up with the same error message. During setup, XP tells me there is no hard drives plugged into the laptop.

I am at the point of desperation. Ideally I like to get XP installed. If this is not possible, I will settle for Vista. I know I may need a recovery disc for this, but as mentioned I deleted the recovery partition on the original hard drive and I didn't receive any discs with purchase.

I would be eternally grateful for any help on this matter.
Thank you in advance.

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MattWilson
Visitor
May 2008
May 2008

Welcome to ClubVAIO :slight_smile:

Installing XP on a SATA HDD has always been a difficult affair as XP's installation environment does not natively support it.

As for the hard drive its self - is it seated into its connectors correctly?

Since you managed to install XP on the disk with another computer does it boot on that machine?

:thinking:

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Dilla
Visitor
May 2008
May 2008

Thanks for the welcome Matt.

Yes, the HDD is sitting into its connection comfortably!
Again yes, that's the weird thing - the HDD boots fine when it's plugged into my PC.

I have spoken to Vaio Support not long ago, they tell me 'officially' the laptop isn't 'down-grade-able'! I have managed to get them to send me a Restore CD for the laptop - which I should have before the week is over, but in an ideal world I really want to get XP on this laptop!

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MattWilson
Visitor
May 2008
May 2008

Sony offically only support the operating system version it was released with and above which is sensible but there are a lot of users that wish to downgrade. The drivers are the main issue as they are different for different operating systems. All the drivers are available if you look for them. Your machine is a reincarnation of the older N series and so that would be a good place to start.

To install XP using your Laptop you will require a portable floppy disk drive so that you can install the SATA drivers for the installation environment. Instructions are posted all over the internet and some here.

For now i would wait and see if you have any luck with the recovery disk - if that doesn't work then post back. It could be that one of the connections to the motherboard was broken by removing/replacing the drive and may not be obvious.

Good Luck

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