No recovery disks, Win7 wont load, nor will anything else.

[tangram55]

Morning all,

I am trying to repair a Vaio Notebook for a friend. She sadly neglected to make any recovery disks when she first got the Laptop, so I'm having a lot of trouble. Windows 7 wont fully load, nor can I get past the first screen in any of the Win7 installation disks.

I have run a Linux live CD and am able to see that there may be some sector mapping problems on the HDD, but as it is a Toshiba HDD there are no bootable diagnotics that I can find. A defrag might sort it, but there are no defrag programmes in Linux Ideally, if I could find a way to boot from a CD and use chkdsk I may fix it, but none of the utility bootables I've found work. UBCD wont work, any of my  Windows XP disks give me a BSOD as does Barts PE disk.

I'm running out of options here !

Model VPCEB1E0E/WI

[Blencogo]

If you can't boot from a Windows 7 installation disc and run a repair installation then the hard disc has probably failed.

Do you see the Vaio Logo splash screen during the boot sequence?

If yes, have you tried a System Recovery from the HDD Hidden Recovery Partition?

At the Vaio Logo press F10 repeatedly and this should start the Recovery Centre.

I attach a copy of the Recovery Guide (Page 9): -

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/Manuals/RecoTS/2010Q1_TRG_EN.pdf

[tangram55]

Yep, I tried f10 too, but it just hung at a screen of blue swirly lines.

Im now wondering if she has a virus, as several of the bootable dignostics Ive tried have indicated as much since my first post,

Im now running thru a selection of bottable AV packages.

[tangram55]

Sorted.

I *finally* found a chkdsk equivalent programme on UBCD and it marked 9 bad sectors on the HDD. NOW I've finally been able to install Windows 7 !

[Blencogo]

Great result.

Hope everything else is OK.