Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:17:07 +1000 From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] OT: VAIO PCG-505F notebook system restoration
The first thing I'd try is putting the hard drive into another machine and seeing what happens. There's a small but non-zero chance that it's the BIOS and not the hard drive.
Otherwise perhaps it's a virus of some sort? (ironic given he was doing virus updates!) - I can't remember the name of it but there is one that corrupts the first part of the hard drive, killing the partition table (amongst other things) - I had to help a friend recover from one of those years ago.
As for easiest way to load 98SE, my suggestion is to repartition it in the Vaio, put it into another computer, sys the drive and copy the win98 install files (I generally create c:\windows\options\cabs and copy them there, that way I don't have to stuff around in the registry telling Windows its default setup file directory isn't somewhere else). The only thing to watch is that Windows setup will see the existing c:\windows and suggest to install into c:\windows.000, just tell it to install into c:\windows, it'll listen to you eventually!
Good luck!
- Raymond
At 03:40 PM 28/04/2005 -0700, you wrote:
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 22:39:50 +0000 From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: OT: VAIO PCG-505F notebook system restoration
Well... after checking around the net and not finding much, I'm back here at the trusty Libretto suppot list to ask another off topic question.
A friend's Sony VAIO PCG-505F notebook all of a sudden went belly-up the other night after a couple of hours of loading virus updates, and then working fine for an hour or so. When booted up again, it gave that fatal "No operating system found" DOS message. No C: when booting from FDD. And Partition Magic reporting no partition of any kind at all on the 4GB HDD!
At least it saw the HDD, so I'm guessing it's okay.
Why that happened is a huge area of curiosity to me... but I'll skip to asking if anyone knows how to go about reloading W98SE on this system. I've downloaded the few drivers available on the Sony support pages, and am wondering if I'm going to have to pull the HDD, and load the W98SE setup files onto the drive via the desktop.
One of only 2-3 driver downloads was for the external DVD drive, so I'm guessing that it's not going to boot from the drive, or recognize it at all in DOS. Anyone know anything about that?
In a day or so I'l be going over there, and hopefully will have everything I need to get the minimum going on the ailing puppy...
Thx,
Matt
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