Community

bhchild

Right im completely worried cos i just got this nice Vaio notebook VGN-FZ21M as an early birthday present yesterday and its crashed and i cant get it back up at all.

The whole story is: Once i got it, i updated the files that needed updated, and then made the Recovery disks for it. All good sofar, I then uninstalled the norton firewall and antivirus things, cos they only had a 60day trial thing, and uninstalled the trials for the office program trials because i had other full versions of them (though not as recent). Next i installed bitdefender 2008 (i actually used a bitdefender 9 disk but it wasnt compatible with vista, this being our first vista computer, so i downloaded bitdefender 2008 and installed and updated it).

This was all good, and i was told to create a restore point by my dad while the bitdefender was updating, but i forgot about it... so didnt have that. I wanted to test the graphics out cos it is now the best comp in the house, so i installed Lotr Battle for middle earth 2, which i have installed on 3 different computers and they worked perfectly, though with low-medium graphics. It installed fine, and on the last window it asked to Lauch BFME2 so i said yes. the Loading screen came up and after about 2 minutes (this is suposed to load up in about 20-30secs) i got the Blue screen of death and comp restarted.

When it came on again, i got the word Vaio on the first screen (right after you push the power button to turn on normally) and then a full black screen with little white words at the top saying "No operating system found"

EDIT: Ok just found out that the computer thinks that there is NO hard drive. We tried to wipe/erase the hard drive and it asked to pick one from and list and there isnt one, we also ran a diagnostics in the same place, and it said there is no hard drive.

Sofar i cant get the comp up at all again, i have restarted so many times, and have just used the first recovery disk and and tried a C drive recovery, but it said it was too small and to do complete recovery, so i then did that and got Error: 334. It seems I am now out of options without wiping the hard drive down completely.

If anyone can help if they know a reason why it crashed or how to get it up again i would be VERY grateful

kenyon1

Miaybe it just got confused, us humans get confused you know!!

Not saying it will be, but it could be a hardware issue. I would do a factory reset. If you dont have the disks press F10 when loading at first boot.

If it does it again, call Sony. Its still in warranty.

bhchild

it seems more confused than me anyway, says its got no brain (hard drive). not going great here bah

Blencogo

Hi bhchild and welcome to Club Vaio.

It sounds like either a bad connection to the hard drive or the MBR or BOOT.INI have become corrupt.

Have you resized any partitions on the disc or created any new ones? Have you installed any virtual drive software like Daemon Tools? These interfere with the Recovery Process.

I think you need to return the Vaio to the shop where it was bought and ask them to fix it or replace it. Whatever has happened, it should be possible to Recover the system using F10 on booting. If you cannot recover from either the hard drive or from the recovery discs then this is a fault with the Vaio.

The only things you can try are: -

1. At the first Vaio Logo screen press F2 repeatedly to get into the BIOS. Does the BIOS recognise the hard drive? Pull up the BIOS default values and save these as a precaution.

2. Does the HDD show in the Boot Sequence in the BIOS?

3. If you turn your Vaio upside down, you will see the cover for the hard drive in the bottom left-hand corner. This is held on by one screw. You could carefully remove this cover and gently press the hard drive towards the middle of the Vaio to make sure the connector is fully engaged. Only recommended if you know what you are doing - you don't want to invalidate the warranty.

4. You can try phoning Sony Support here: -

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/contacts/contacts.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&tp=vaio&cc=en_GB&cm=phone

but I would avoid this to begin with as all they can do is to collect the Vaio and attempt to repair it. You should not be asked to do without this new machine - it is the Vendors responsibility to sell a product that works properly.

5. You could try booting from a CD and try to repair the MBR but the sad truth is that you cannot repair a HDD if it is not recognised by the BIOS.

Let us know how you get on.

bhchild

Right ill try some of that, but it doesnt recognise a hard drive at all, it seems o think it doesnt exist, which is weird because it WAS working to begin with, so i dont think that it must have disconnected randomly, esspeccially since if it did it would have been when it was sitting without being moved. Hmmm ill try a few other commands you have said there

Oh and i havnt resized or partitioned the hard drives or anything, havnt touched anything to do with em