Solved EMERGENCY- Sony Vaio "Operating System Not Found" (friend's drive!)

[Miranova23]

EMERGENCY- Sony Vaio "Operating System Not Found" (friend's drive!)

My friend's hard drive in his Sony Vaio was riddled with viruses, malware, rootkits, you name it. I just had this hard drive in & out of my rig for the past couple days. I got it all set up fine, albeit with Win XP MCE, only installed my ethernet driver, and was all set to put it back in his laptop.

This happened once, & I figured it was a glitch, so I took it back out, into the rig, redid all I'd done, and took a system image of the drive. Now, I've put it back in the laptop, and AGAIN-- Vaio logo, then straight to black screen "Operating System Not Found." I promised him an absolutely no-cost no-risk wipe, (in exchange for him getting me a job) and now this!

Physically the drive is fine. It passed a disk check yesterday, and no clicking ever. The optical drive won't read my Dell OEM Win XP MCE disc, so I popped in my Win 7 disc to at least do a startup repair. It reports no operating systems installed, but is that just cuz there's no win 7 installed? I'm copying that system image over to my external to try that right now. Can I use the system image of XP with the 7 disc?

AND WHAT ELSE CAN I DO! :shock:

 

[karlsnooks]

Your friend's computer came to you what OS installed?

 

[Miranova23]

From the factory, it had Vista, and belonged to his mom. Then she gave it to him, but had no discs or documentation saved from it. Someone before me had previously wiped that, and reinstalled Vista from some disc they had.

My 32bit Win 7 disc is able to be read. I wonder if I should do a preliminary install of that... My XP disc isn't showing up at all. I checked the Bios- not much there, but I set the 1st boot device as the CD-Rom & 2nd the internal hard drive. I just reseated it a third time, and the 20GB system image has copied from my rig to an external. Can I load an XP image through the Win 7 disc?

I don't care what I have to do. I have the system image so the system is saved.

 

[Miranova23]

When I put it back in my rig after the first time I saw "Operating System Not Found," there was a boot error so putting it back in the rig probably won't help. It'd be the same cycle.

 

[seavixen32]

If all else fails, you can get a set of recovery discs from Sony Support: Sony eSupport - Electronics

 

[Miranova23]

I don't have a Vista disc, or any Vista image, on me. What would their recovery discs allow me to do exactly?

 

[seavixen32]

I don't have a Vista disc, or any Vista image, on me. What would their recovery discs allow me to do exactly?

They would recover the computer to its out-of-box state i.e. exactly how it was when it was bought new, which would mean anything not backed up would be lost and all applications would need to be reinstalled.

 

[karlsnooks]

is the Certificate of Authenticity sticker still on the computer?

On laptops, the sticker is normally on the bottom and has a yellow color.

 

[Miranova23]

Yes, the COA is intact.

Okay, first, cuz speed is important, I'm going to take it down the street to this repair shop.

Once it's running something again, do you think I'd be able to, even painfully, reinstall XP and use the system image I have?

 

[karlsnooks]

No.

 

[Miranova23]

...Why? Is there something hardwired on this mobo or bios or something that it won't accept anything except Vista? It's a rather weak computer and could barely handle Vista, even without the viruses.

 

[seavixen32]

If the original operating system was Windows Vista OEM then that is tied to the computer by way of reference to the motherboard and that is why it won't accept Windows XP.

If you have access to a Windows Vista disc that is the same version that was originally installed then you can use that to reinstall Windows using the product key on the COA sticker to activate it.

Although this tutorial refers to Windows Seven, it should be good for Windows Vista too.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/174907-clean-install-factory-coa-activation-key.html

 

[Miranova23]

I was afraid you'd say that.

Win 7 said it couldn't find any installations, and while "looking for drivers to load," I saw that the drive is intact, but that there was another small 30MB drive/partition called "Boot X." It seems irrational to me that any company would make a laptop that is unable to be even upgraded...

 

[Miranova23]

On the contrary, it's letting me install Windows 7... HUH???

 

[seavixen32]

Yes, the COA is intact.

Okay, first, cuz speed is important, I'm going to take it down the street to this repair shop.

Once it's running something again, do you think I'd be able to, even painfully, reinstall XP and use the system image I have?

What you could do is restore the system image, then partition the drive and dual-boot with XP.

However, as you say, your first step should be to get it checked over, and then decide what to do from then.

 

[Miranova23]

I found this on another site:
Sony Vaio: Downgrade Vista > XP - General-Laptops-Notebooks - Laptops-Notebooks

"Some of notebooks nowadays are setting its HDD to AHCI mode instead of standard IDE. In this case you should try to look for the AHCI driver for HDD first. During the setup you'll need the driver. Even worse you'll need a FDD to do this. I have (well, actually my office has) a USB FDD for this kind of things, it's working. This week I'd done downgraded to XP from Vista on Dell laptop, and it's working perfectly (after getting AHCI driver).

It seems to me that the latest Sony VAIO laptop has some issues on downgrading due to drivers issue. You should check the availability of the drivers for XP. Last time my friend failed to downgrade since he couldn't find the XP drivers on his Sony Vaio."

Ugh, drivers. I'm tempted to say screw it & I'll get my brother's Vista disc [but that's Monday at earliest.]

2 things you should know about my friend though: He likes things customized, and organized. The Libraries of Vista made a mess of his files, so he'd resorted to saving everything to the Desktop. Also he had no use for any of the unchangeable names, as he only uses this laptop for audio production and web browsing, and nothing else. Secondly, he likes to use Windows Classic Style anyway, so that he can change any color of anything.

I figured, I have my XP oem, it uses the basic real folder system, has a Classic option, and will run even faster. It's a dual core 1.73 GHz, 2GB ram. And I didn't have to wait til my family comes to visit on Monday to bring the Vista disc with them.

Now, idk... If I did setup Vista again, would it be possible for me to obliterate the libraries in anyway? Or where would I put the actual folders... Somehow thinking of it in terms of 1 drive instead of 2, confuses me...

 

[seavixen32]

If it's any help to you, one of the first things I do whenever I change my computer is to create a separate partition purely for all my personal data.

1) I don't have to get my head round libraries.

2) If ever I have to restore Windows my data is safe.

So, in that sense, you could completely ignore libraries. Trying to delete them can cause more problems as they are a virtual folder for any data you put in them.

 

[Miranova23]

Excellent idea, the data partition- yes, he needs good simple-to-understand backup. (My poor friend here doesn't even know what Adobe Reader is.)

I have since had lunch, am not so lightheaded atm, and thus was able to understand all these workarounds I've found. Best put, "These drivers are essential as Windows XP came before the invention of SATA disk drives. Now when you want to install XP on a computer equipped with SATA drive the SETUP process wouldn’t able to detect it and hence it will terminate. Get your sata drivers for this model from here and slipstream those into your xp installation cd using nLite (a very good tool)."

[GUIDE] Sony Vaio SR XP Downgrade Instructions

I've revisited the model's driver page on Sony's site, and found there is a drop down menu to select operating systems. I selected XP, and found exactly what these "hacks" say you need: Intel SATA non-RAID driver. I've used nLite a few years ago to install XP Prof after a crash on my dad's computer. Since then, you can find my old posts around here on how I've played with nearly every option in RT-7Lite.

As I keep saying after every step now, the rest should be cake. Which means I'll be back in half an hour when something else won't work!

 

[theog]

Do you have a key for Win XP?

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/66010-sata-drivers-load-windows-xp-setup-dual-boot.html
OR
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72185-sata-drivers-slipstream-into-windows-xp-cd.html

 

[Miranova23]

Yes sir I do. =)