Shiskine

A friend has dropped off his three year old Vaio laptop (running XP) which won't boot. If I use F8, whatever option I choose (safe mode, command prompt, last good configuration), I see the Windows loading screen followed by a flicker whereupon it restarts itself.

I booted from my own (Evesham) recovery CD and started the recovery console. It looks like the hard drive has two partitions (C & D) and whilst I can see the contents of D drive, typing dir at the c: prompt brings up the message "An error occurred during directory enumeration"

I then ran chkdsk (with the /r switch) on the C: drive and it appears to have hung at 53% checked.

I'm sure someone mentioned on here that hard disk failure was a common issue with Vaios, but the fact that the D partition seems okay makes me think it's just the primary partition that's fooked.

Before I zap the hard drive and reinstall Windows XP, does anyone have any suggestions for further diagnostic checks I can run?

C7BLE

depends which model but the machine itself may have a recovery partition you can do a restore from (f6 I think at boot, again depends on the model)

It sounds like the MBR is gone, you can do an XP repair and possibly get it back

Difficult to day more without more info

Shiskine

I've rung the guy and he's happy for me to just blitz it and reinstall on one single partition so just about to do that ...

It's a PGC-7M1M by the way

Umski

Hmm, don't think it would get that far with a knackered MBR - sounds like h/w failure either in laptop or drive with buggered sectors during boot (have seen this very recently). What model drive is it?

Umski

Make sure you check the disk first for bad bits

Shiskine

I was just going to fdisk and create a single partition. Doesn't it check the new partition when it formats it?

Chris Type R

Have you checked the manuals ?

IIRC there's an option to create recovery DVDs just after the BIOS test. These can then be used to restore the machine including the licensed OS etc. either over the existing HDD, or on to a new HDD.

I had to fix my brother's VAIO recently. Replaced the HDD with a 7200RPM drive, maxed the RAM to 2GB. Runs a lot better now.

Chris Type R

I think that you may need to format during the install, and ensure that you're not doing a quick format. Personally I'd replace the drive TBH.

Shiskine

The owner never made his own recovery discs ...

C7BLE

STOP

DO NOT BLOW AWAY THE RECOVERY PARTITION IF THERE IS ONE

that is stupid

Find out if it has one then use it otherwise you are in for a world of hurt