1. Can you give us the exact Make, Series, Model and serial number of the notebook? I'm not that familiar with laptops/notebooks and I'd like to see if I can find some documentation with pictures from Sony web site or internet. I'm interested in how hard it would be to reseat the hard drive in its connection and also what BIOS configuration information is available thru CMOS setup displays.
Make: Sony Vaio
Series: ?
Model: ?
Serial Nbr: ?
2. Similiar information on the hard drive if it's not too much trouble (otherwise we can wait on that):
Make:
Model:
Capacity:
The manufacturer of the hard drive may have some diagnostic utilities that you can download and run to test the operation of the drive and the integrity of the disk surfaces (although I'm thinking you have to see drive in BIOS before you can access it. If I'm wrong on this point, someone please correct me.)
You're probably going to have to try your hard drive in a known good machine, or put a known good hard drive in your laptop to troubleshoot this if "reseating" the hard drive doesn't help.
2. What version/level of Windows XP do you have?
Version: Home Edition or Professional
Level: Original, Service Pack 1 (SP1), or Service Pack 2 (SP2)
3. Have you ever successfully booted this Sony Vaio laptop from the hard drive? Basically have you been using it successfully in the past with its current configuration?
I'm assuming the only configuration change is your reset the CMOS settings to their original factory defaults.
4. Was the hardware recently worked on or modified? Or did you receive it broken?
5. In your first post you asked for a "boot" disk? Is this a Windows XP setup CD, a Sony Vaio Recovery CD, or something else?
6. I don't think the Sony Vaio Recovery CDs are all the same. I would think you would need one to match the Make and Model of your laptop. But who knows, maybe they have all drivers necessary for complete family of laptops. Somebody else might want to comment on this.
If you're talking about Window XP Recovery Console, yeah that's standard Microsoft stuff, but you might need a Windows XP setup CD of the correct Level, e.g. original, SP1, SP2.
7. If you want to verify the laptop still works, you could try a bootable CD. The following link for "MemTest86 3.3" gives you access to CD or floppy drive images that boot and run from their own operating system.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d1247.html http://www.memtest86.com/ http://www.bootdisk.com/