Sony Vaio Laptop. Few days ago screen froze, I powered off and on restart the vaoi screen loads but then the screen goes black and in the left hand corner an underscore flashes soon afterwards it displays Operating System Not Found, been scratching my head ever since, can someone please help me out?
I got to send it back to Sony or what? How long would that process take for them to replace it? What road should I take in your opinion?
if under warranty then send it back to be fixed or replaced. could take upwards of 6 weeks but that is a guess so should ask them when you talk to them.
before you do anything do a chkdsk c:/f on the system drive. The error you get "operating system not found" is a usual symptom of corrupted files. When windows has an abnormal shutdown (like in your case) some of the system files will get corrupted. This is a simple to fix problem by just doing a chkdsk or scandisk on the drive. 95 percent of the time this will fix your problem, it has fix my computer everytime. The hard part is getting to do the chkdsk or scandisk on a nonbooting computer, but it can be done. The best and easiest way to do it is to use a bartpe (easy to make if you have your windows installation cd) bootup with the bartpe at the GO bottom open the command box and type chkdsk c: /f If the command box doesnt work do following Go/programs/a43 file management utilitys Next rightclick on the C: partition/properties/tools/error checking Right here you can run a scandisk (make sure both boxes are check to fix errors), scandisk is similar to chkdsk. That's what I would do first, it's a quick fix and will make your computer bootable again.
Firstly thanks for the help. Well I called Sony and they are having someone pick up the laptop tomorrow and they said it should be resolved within 5 days. Jony218, I do not have the Windows installation CD, I would like to try your method, is there any other options to get to the chkdsk etc?
The only other method is to remove the hard drive and get a usb bridge adapter (cost about 20.00) hook the hard drive to another computer usb port (like an external drive) and run a scandisk from there. Theres also the free "testdisk" boot cd, but that is more complicated but it will repair a corrupted boot sector. I would try a chkdsk/scandisk first (which will usually fix the problem). As long as the hard drive is spinning and you haven't formatted it, it can probably be fixed and all data recovered.
Thanks for the guidance Joni. It's been collected and sent to Sony for repair so fingers crossed it's repaired under warranty. Again thanks for the help, looks a very helpful forum indeed and no doubt I'll be posting in the future.
