Ok I really need help.I tried to add an xtra mem card to my sony vaio desktop,not much room inside the case to manuever the card into the slot easily,and instead of taking out the floppy drive(which I never use), I sort of pushed it through the slot(dragging it on the pins in the plug) til it was centered then pushed it in and locked the tabs.I started it and got the black "Your comp.was either not shut down properly...or you installed new hardware" screen I clicked on the restart normally option waited, the windows XP sceen flashed then went back to the black "improper shutdown" screen.I tried selecting "start in safe mode" it seemed like it tried but froze on the list of startup items screen.I tried norm.start, no good.I went back and removed the memory card I installed and tried to restart again w/only my orig.256MB card,this time all I got was constant beeping,blank screen. I went back in again and found the memory card not plugged in fully and noticed a difference in the other plug slot, the difference was 2 small pieces of metal(silver)possibly pieces of the prongs inside the DIMM slot which may have came off from pushing the card through the slot,I removed those pieces, installed both memory cards and tried to restart, I got the NTLDR screen this time (I think) I ended up removing all the memory cards (I dont know if they could've gotten damaged by having the metal in the slot and turning the comp.on)and installed 1 card I know is good and tried again,same thing,I removed the hard drive and tried it in another XP mach. same thing-NTLDR is missing.I put the HD back in orig. mach.and tried again. I got a black screen saying something like an error... install system disk... I only have Sony sys. recovery disks 1,2,3 Application recovery disks 1,2 and Driver recovery disk,so I tried the Sys. recovery disk 1 but when I got to the option to partition drive I didn't want to completely erase my HD ( no other options)Does anyone have any advice on what I should do?Can I get into the HD to save my files before recovering?Is there any way to test the motherboard,DIMM slots and or memory cards to see if they are damaged? I was thinking about taking it to Best Buy(where I bought it in 2001) and letting the Geek Squad check it,but,I already spent 19.95 on Sony tel.support only to be told they think I need to do a full sys. recovery(which they will walk me through)I know this is a long post,so thanks to anyone who has the patience to read it,I'd appreciate any feedback.
