Quote:
Originally Posted by lumberjim
jinx's vaio is effed up. it was going round and round trying to reboot, but failing. I ran the ultimate boot cd, and got it up, but there does not appear to be a C drive.
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Only better computer provide the hardware diagnostics on the hard drive, on a CD, and on their web site ... for free.
I you can boot the machine from a CD, then the diagnostics will load and test all hardware ... without the complications of Windows.
All manufacturers have these diagnostics. Your problem is exactly why better manufacturers provide these diagnostics. If not provided, then use another machine to burn a bootable CD (or USB stick) with the diagnostic from the disk drive manufacturer. Idea is to learn what is wrong long before trying to fix anything ... so that data is not lost and so that the problem is not made exponentially more complex.
Also available are other boot functions enabled by pressing various keys as the machine boots. Sometimes F2, F5, F8 or Del key provides a list of booting options. One possible option is verbose - to list each step the BIOS goes through to load Windows.
I have never run a Vaio so I do not know which keys enable which booting functions. Could be defective hardware. Could be a trashed boot file. Confirm the hardware is good (use diagnostics) before executing repair software such as Fixboot.