Sony VIAO help

[yokomo]

Ok here is the deal I boutght a sony vioa notebook from one of these used computer dealers (yea I know what your thinking), but any way. It is a PCG-SRX77P he fired it up showed me it worked and the battery was ok and all the normal stuff, so we made the deal $500.00 and then he rebooted it in safe mode to a command prompt went to c: as I am sure you all know, then to the windows dir and typed "del *.*" He then told me I would have to get a firewire enclosure and all I would have to do is install winXP from that. Well now that is were I have a problem I did not want to wait so I pulled out the harddrive and put it in my compaq EVO and installed O/S and then pulled it out and put it in my VIAO and it says "cannot read drive press ctrl alt del to reboot" so I bought a firewire drive from comp usa. It had the 6 pin wire so I bought the 6 pin to 4 pin cord and it does not even see it. So I contacted sony and all they do is talk me in circles. So I bought a SONY external firewire drive same pin problems with the cord and once again it does nothing.. any advice any one has would be awsome so far I am about $700.00 into this thing and I really don't wanna give up cuz it is a nice little notebook for school but it is driving me nuts that I can't get it to work.. if any one out there has the same laptop I would be willing to work out a deal to send the hard drive to you or the laptop what ever it takes to get it up and running agin... thanks for you time and like I said any help at all would be better than what I have got from sony.

 

[LTC8K6]

Why can't you just buy WinXP and install it like anybody else would?

 

[yokomo]

that is what I did (bought a copy of windows and a fire wire drive). I think it is the fact that I don't have the "SONY ILINK" cdrom with the 4 pin connection, and that is the only port it will see at boot so once windows is in there I have a usb burner that I will use with it but intill windows is installed in there I cannot use it.. it has no internal drives at all.. So if some one has the same laptop, and they pull thier hardrive and install from the recovery disks and I give them my OEM number and send it back to me it should be all good. I hope?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Have you gone into the setup and looked at the boot options? Isn't Ilink just the Sony branding for ordinary IEEE1394?

 

[LTC8K6]

Hmmm.....not sure why your little hard drive swap trick didn't work.

Perhaps you can go into the BIOS and try to set it to boot from USB or firewire as jack said?

 

[yokomo]

In the BIOS the only options are ILINK boot and network boot that is all...

 

[Gentle]

Just curious, but why did you install an operating system on it first and then put it in your notebook?

Can you merely format the hard drive and then boot to the install CD for the installation?

Gentle

 

[LTC8K6]

The laptop doesn't have a built in CD/DVD drive, Gentle.

The only thing he's got is the built in HD, which it's not recognizing, and the ilink option, which doesn't appear to be working either.

 

[yokomo]

that is what I am thinking, that when I took the hardrive out and installed the OS in the compaq, I lost so of the needed drivers that were mabey in another part of the harddrive. Because when I formated it there were 2 partions and I am thinking that mabey one of them was needed or some thing?

as it sits now when I start it all I get is the sony screen and then it says

"A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

and all sony can tell me is that the reason it is not working is because I am not useing the restore disks but I do not see how the restore disks will do any thing diffrent if it will not even address the crrom at all..and as far as a network boot can you even install an OS in that way?

 

[yokomo]

Any one in here have this laptop that I could mail you my harddrive and you could do the restore thing for me and send it back possible? that is a thought..

 

[WildViper]

I will be willing to help you out, however you have to check if I can even do that.

I have a PCG-GRV550. I am busy this weekend and thus can't check myself.

Not sure if it will work.

Here are some other ideas:

1. Maybe the HD has died on you?? Check it back on your other laptop.

2. If it works, delete the WinXP Install on there and install FreeDos. Then plug it back in your Sony. See if that works..if it does, you can probably install WinXP through USB/Firewire.

You can PM me.

 

[Paperlantern]

99% of the time i use a external USB drive to install OS's on systems with no cd roms, not firewire *shrugs* hope you figure it out man . Another thing i was wondering about though, is, most sonys have a product key on the bottom of them, if your purchasing the PC, and that comes With it, technically your entitled to the OS and he had no right to delete it. But, it may not have the product key, it was just a thought

 

[yokomo]

It was the easiest way to delete the files in there that he felt I was not intiltled to; and if all I had to do is get a drive and reinstall it that would have been great but no such luck...

 

[dclive]

The simplest solution to this is to take the hard drive to another computer (say, a desktop machine via a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE/power converter), then format the 2.5" hard drive with options so that it will boot into MSDOS (there are plenty of utilities you can google for to do this if you need help). Once that's done, copy the XP cd onto the hard drive (say, into \XPCD). Then put the hard drive back into the original machine, boot into DOS, and then go through the motions of installing XP. It will take a LONG time since you didn't put SMARTDRV and all that on there, but it will eventually finish and go thru the install.

When you format, remove ALL partitions on the drive, make a new FAT32 partition of the largest size you can, and then when it's all installed, convert to NTFS later.

 

[Paperlantern]

that sounds awful complicated to be the simplest solution... and i'm not so sure it will work, if you remove all partitions and format the drive, that has the install files on it, i dont think it will jive too well with his ultimate goal. i still think buying a usb cd rom is the way to go, if there is no cd rom on that machine it had to have been given legacy usb support, the install should go the same as it would if installing from an internal drive, just a skosh slower.

 

[compusaguy]

Why would anyone want a computer without at least a CD-ROM built in? What happens after you get Windows installed after all this trouble and something hoses the install? What a NIGHTMARE.

 

[yokomo]

Thanks for pointing that out man, Kudos. The idea behind it is that if you don't need the drives all the time why waste the battery to spin them up and power them... Or so that is how I saw it.. it is ment to be an on the go system for school work.. and I had thought at first it was just what I needed but so far just a big head ach...

well here is a wierd thing I installed winxp using fat32 and it loaded up and said some thing like ntlr missing and installed it using ntfs and still same error as before as for the free dos thing I found it as an iso file and what do I do with it from there to make a bootabe cdrom for installing it?.....

that freedos thing really looks like a great tool just need to do some research and figure out how to make it happen...

to every one thank you for you time....

 

[WildViper]

Well here is my idea of what I said before:

Install FreeDos on it from your other comp. I am presuming the other comp has a CDROM drive.

With the ISO file, write the image to a CD...then check if the CD will bootup on the other comp. If so, remove the HD then place the non-working hD in it.

Then delete the WinXP install and instead install FreeDos on the HD. Take the CD out and see if it boots into FreeDos from the HD. If it does, then make sure you install some USB/firewire drivers on there so that when it reboots it loads those drivers and it works.

Once everything is setup, take the HD out and put it back in Vaio. If it boots into FreeDos, then see if it recognizes your firewire drives. That should solve it then.

I think.

 

[yokomo]

All praise be to "WildViper" did the free dos thing on the compaq installed with out a hitch... then put the harddrive in the viao and it worked perfectly... so I took it back out and in the compaq to copy the winxp disk to the harddrive and it cannot see the cdrom? or at leaset it cannot see it as drive a or b as that is what I tryed and it give me a can not read drive so crap... now what? do I need like some old dos drivers for the cdrom or what and if so how do I install them via floopy mabey? were almost ther guys please help...

 

[WildViper]

There are some CDRom DOS Drivers out there. Not sure where. Google it.

If not, use this: Bart's Boot Disk to create a floppy that will recognize your CD.

Boot into the Compaq with the floppy with the Vaio HD in it. It should recognize the CD. Now copy the WinXP on the HD from the CD in your Compaq.

Put the HD back in your Vaio and see if you can run the XP Setup. Your Vaio should see the HD and boot since you would have the FreeDos on there still.

I am not sure if you can install XP from HD, however, give it a shot. I would think it would work.

Let us know. Good lessons for all here.

EDIT: Another way to do this would be to get a USB External CDRom. Check this site to have your FreeDos recognize USB port. USB in Dos

 

[yokomo]

Hey man see how this hits ya? I put the viao HD in the compaq. Dropped in my win98se disk, it give you the option to boot with cdrom support.. Did that and it won't let me copy my winXP disk it say Write protection error? Man I thougt I really found a supper slick way to solve it; one thing I did do is load a ton of mame stuff in it and now I got a killer little arcade game till I figure it out. I played joust with the help of 2 friends on it for 5hours and 12 minutes till the battery died man to me that is awsome that little battery lasted forever... I won a "bootable" pcmcia cdrom on monday and it should be here any day now so mabey that will fix all my woes? Thanks to every one that has helped....

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: dclive
The simplest solution to this is to take the hard drive to another computer (say, a desktop machine via a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE/power converter), then format the 2.5" hard drive with options so that it will boot into MSDOS (there are plenty of utilities you can google for to do this if you need help). Once that's done, copy the XP cd onto the hard drive (say, into \XPCD). Then put the hard drive back into the original machine, boot into DOS, and then go through the motions of installing XP. It will take a LONG time since you didn't put SMARTDRV and all that on there, but it will eventually finish and go thru the install.

When you format, remove ALL partitions on the drive, make a new FAT32 partition of the largest size you can, and then when it's all installed, convert to NTFS later.

This will work, guys. You're just formatting the hard drive, putting a basic DOS-bootable OS on there, and then running WINNT32.EXE, the Windows XP setup program. Total time (not including copying) might be 10 minutes.

 

[aceman817]

dclive,

i have a similar problem with one of my laptops. it doesn't have a cdrom or floppy drive and i need to load xp on it. i took the hard drive out and put it in one of my desktop systems with an adapter. i formatted it fat32 in xp and then did sys c: from a boot disk to make it bootable. i then copied over the entire xp cd and ran winnt.exe from the laptop in DOS (winnt32.exe won't run under DOS). i got a message saying that the ramdrive wasn't present and then it said it was copying over files which is taking over an hour. the hard drive led is constantly flashing but the system seems like it is frozen. is that normal? is there a better way to do it? i have systems that don't have any means with which to interface. :|

 

[yokomo]

please give some specs of the unit you are trying to do this with.. Winxp is not transplantable I am finding out...

 

[aceman817]

it is a p3 with 128mb ram and a 10gig hard drive. it's a decent machine that certainly meets the requirements. i may try copying smartdrv.exe to the root of the hard drive to see if setup will detect it and use a ram drive.