Sony Vaio VGC-RB54G, reinstalling OS - No HD recognized!

[ultimatum]

Hey guys,

A friend of mine gave me his Sony Vaio desktop pc to fix. He tried reinstalling OS on it but it wouldn't work. After fixing a few overheating issues I got to it. The pc hardware overall works, when entering BIOS it recognizes both hard drives (160 GB each) no problem, when I look at the boot menu to see which one goes first it just states "Intel Volume 0" as the only option to choose. When normally starting the pc with Windows XP cd in it I get the setup and all, then F8 to agree with terms and conditions and when I get to the part to select the partitions there are 4 lines saying something like, "No hard drive device is inserted" or something like that. When I press Enter I get blue screen of death, something to do with a setupp.sys file.

I thought it was the hardware so I disconnected the wires and plugged them all back in their original positions, still the problem persists.

Specs (from memory):
Intel Pentium D 2.8 GHz
2 SATA HD (160 GB each)
1 GB of RAM DDR2 (2x512MB)
Former Windows XP Media Edition

Thats about it, all suggestions, questions, comments are welcome! Thanks in advance.

- Dima

[stevejohnson1958]

What type hard drives?  SATA?  You'll need to install the drivers for these devices during boot...usually by pressing F6.  It happens very quickly...and you may need the drivers supplied by the manufacturer.  They should be on a floppy.

Do you have these?

[ultimatum]

Thanks Saviour for quick response, yes they are both SATA. I don't believe I have the floppy or any time of CD with that. Is it possible to download them from manufacturer's website and burn them on the cd by any chance? Floppy's are so outdated I don't know who still uses them :/

[stevejohnson1958]

You're probably better off looking for them on your motherboard manufacturer's website.

You can, however, try your computer manufacturer's website, first.  Most of the time, they're included on floppies, but they may also be on CDs.  Yes...you can have them on CD.


Keep us posted...

[ultimatum]

Alright,

After a day of searching for a CD nothing came up. I checked the mobo for a sticker with a model on it and nothing there too. How can I check the model of the mobo? I checked manufacturer's website for original files and operating files nothing there that would touch hard drives or system files except audio/video/lan drivers.

What are my options from here on? Should I call tech support?

[JJ 3000]

Have you tried with just one HD connected?

[ultimatum]

No, would that do the trick? I'll try that tomorrow.

[ultimatum]

I've tried disconnecting one hard drive and starting the pc that way, again BIOS information tab finds the harddrive but in the boot menu says No Hard Drive installed. Samething when I switched them, leaving on the other one off. On the last try I connected both of them again and went with OS installation to see if by some miracle it'll work but no luck and I got BSOD with this error:

*** STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0x80808106, 0xF73C1754, 0x00000000)

What are my other options other than buying a stardard HD and installing OS there? Thanks.

- Dima

[ultimatum]

Hey guys,

Thanks for all your replies and suggestions. I've contacted Sony Style technical support and it appears that the computer is initially equipped with a recovery hard drive. Simply, at the start of computer I started the Recovery Console by pressing F10, entered the menu and chose to recover drive C: it took an hour or so and the windows was back up and running like fresh though. Meaning all the files were gone, which is okey I didn't need them anyways.

Once again thank you for your help and keep up the good job.

- Dima