Sony Vaio Giga Pocket - missing operating system

[slycharacter]

This is where I am now:  Windows XP Home Edition --  Pentium 4

1. Had slave hard drive installed - brought it home.

2. Installed Ghost 10.0 on primary c: partition

3. Cloned primary to slave drive  (at least, so I thought)

4. Tried to boot up with floppy saved from Ghost as well as recovery cd from  Ghost.

5.  System will not boot but will allow me to see the files on the d: partition of the primary.

6.  Get message from Ghost that says no recovery point on computer.

7.  Cannot see any files on slave drive.

8.  Called Symantec and they said use Sony recovery disk to reload OS because without Ghost disks all I get is black screen with message "missing operating system" on boot attempts.

9.  Called Sony and they said order Sony recovery kit.  Online chat with Sony seemed pointless. I tried to boot from recovery wizard as Sony instructed but didn't happen.  They said order cd recovery kit and call DriveSavers to save data -- they want left arm and right leg (not willing to hop around).  

10.  Checked Bios and Cmos and all is well.

11. Tried to boot from XP Pro Upgrade cd that I had bought for now dead and buried pc. Get message to hit "r" to go to recovery.

12.  Recovery asks for me to type first option but will not accept any choice other than "1" and that gets me nowhere.  So researched internet from networked computer to find this site.

13. Received Sony recovery disk but don't want to use it until I can find out
if I can save all data, email, etc. on c: drive.

14. Get "missing operating system" upon boot. Almost ready to hop!!.

15. Prefer not to hop - what next??

[homer]

see if u can repair the O.S. by inserting the windows cd and selecting repair.

[GX1_Man]

It sounds like you are looking at a Windows reinstall, but check a few things.

Can you get to Safe Mode (F8 at boot before the WIndows logo)? From there can you do a system restore to a point before all of this?

The next best thing would be to download and burn as an ISO with Nero, etc. a Linux Lice CD. Boot with that and backup your data files to  another drive, across a network, to a CDRW, etc. and then reinstall Windows fromwhatever source you have.

This is my favorite for these cases:

http://www.slax.org/download.php

It will not write anything to your hard drive by running so it is entirely safe for your data! It is free also.  

[panboy]

i think you may have Cloned your Slave to your Primary , and over wrote your FAT table, if you did this and you want to recover any thing you will need to use a data recovery Tool , like RStudio,

i would also try what GXMan Said a use a Linux live disk

and i would Use the XP Recovery Console (its like DOS for XP/Ntfs) and run FIXBOOT and FIXMBR

And also i would Feel bad for buying a Vaio  

[slycharacter]

   :-?

I want to try to use the operating system on another computer with XP Home Edition in order to try to save the files on the Sony.  I have been told to slave the Sony drive to another computer and try to save files that way.  Any suggestions or tips??  I have never done this before but would like to know if there are any cautions or tips.  Thanks for all of the suggestions to this point.  

Once I save the files I'm going to format the drive and start again. [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]

[GX1_Man]

Here's a lot of information. Read through it and ask questions then. As this has all been well written, there's no need to type it in again:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+slave+hard+drive+


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