Weird Vaio Laptop Non-Boot

[Cambridge PC Support]

I picked up an old Sony Vaio laptop yesterday. Customer said it was running slow, so I quickly ran GSmartCtrl (via Parted) on the HDD with a short test which came up fine.

Brought it back to the workshop, cleaned it up. Then I put some more memory in it to perk it up a bit more. Booted up fine into XP. I then decide to run a memory test on it just to make sure it was all happy.

Hitting F10 & F12 alternately to get into the boot options I accidentally fall into the Sony Recovery option, so I immediately cancel out of that and then proceed to go into the CMOS setting and set my memory stick to boot first. Boot up and it comes with "Operating System not found". So I think that maybe it's not liking my memory stick so I try another one. Same thing happens.

So then I try to boot from the HDD, with exactly the same result. So I'm thinking that either the Sony Recovery option has changed something or the HDD is failing. I've stuck the HDD on my bench machine to run a long test.

While it's doing that, I'm trying the memory stick again, which worked fine yesterday but now I'm having no joy.

I've checked the CMOS settings, nothing odd there. So I'm a bit stumped.

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

Additional: it's booting fine from my Memtest CD

 

[Mick]

Can ERD Commander see the OS?

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

I don't have ERD Commander, but my bench machine is reading the HDD fine. GSmart full test is fine. I can see the filesystem fine. I'm doing an image of the whole disk just to be safe.

 

[NYJimbo]

Did you try resetting the BIOS back to defaults and/or the 30 second power button thing ? Does the BIOS see the HD drive when its installed ? Also be sure no DVD is in that drive during all of this testing. Check the HD to make sure the correct partition is set to boot. Lots of weird stuff can happen when you get into a recovery mode and then break out of it. I had an HP do something similar once.

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

Did you try resetting the BIOS back to defaults and/or the 30 second power button thing ? Does the BIOS see the HD drive when its installed ? Also be sure no DVD is in that drive during all of this testing. Check the HD to make sure the correct partition is set to boot. Lots of weird stuff can happen when you get into a recovery mode and then break out of it. I had an HP do something similar once.

You star Jimbo, that did the trick

It's booting off the USB stick now. I'll try the HDD once the image has finished er imaging.

Previously, in the boot order screen on the CMOS settings, it was showing an exclamation mark next to the HDD. It's not now