FZ18L Error 22 - read for a laugh..

Hi All.

Well if want a good laugh, then read on....

I decided it would be fun to play with Ubuntu on my Vaio, but after getting annoyed with the whole load from CD malarky, i decided it would be better to load it onto the harddrive...and thats where the pain begins...

I loaded linux onto my harddrive no issues. Rebooted, got the choice of which OS to load (Vista or Ubuntu) chose ubuntu, and it loaded fine and everything was in order. then i decided to check on the windows side of things.

Rebooted the machin and select Vista from the list and thats when the trouble happened. I got a black screen with the following error on the screen:

"Loading Grub, please wait"
"Error 22"

And it just sits there...so cut a long story short i couldnt boot into windows, but linux is still ok. So i uninstalled Linux partitions (through linux Boot CD) and then tried to load windows..still the same error. So i load up ubuntu and in the partition manager it says that the parttion which holds the Windows stuff is corrupted and that it cant be recovered...fair enough i thought...so...i deleted it.... :S

Thinking i could use the recovery partition of the harddrive to boot up from and load factory settings...however now i cant do that...all i get is this stupid error. I dont have the Sony recovery disks to boot from...I know stupid.

From what i can find on the Internet is that the partition table has become out of wack. However they only explain how to fix it via windows.

I even tried booting from a genuine windows disk and when i do ( and go through the motions it say it can't install the OS cos the hard drive doesn't EXIST?!?!?!

Any help would be much appriceited...as i dont REALLY want to be left with a £1000 paper weight....

 

Try to install Linux again and reformat your hdd from there?

 

Tried that.

I have a "recovery" directory. Which was there with the laptop. Two small segments of 3mb - which are unallocated. And one large segment which is formatted NFTS.

 

you might be able to access the recovery partition without a disc. just press f10 while the system is booting. i cant remember exactly if its f10,11 or 12 sorry....

 

Ok, I managed to get a Vista disk that i could boot from. Repaired the Boot loader in CMD and manged to install windows from this disk - however i now trying to get my Sony back to being...well a Sony so I thought i would try the Recovery option (F10) That now works however instead of bringing up the standard Recovery options - i get the boot loader options.

Any ideas? (Going to phone Sony tomorrow)

 

A friend of mine encountered this problem as well. However what he did was simply insert his recovery disks and set his C drive back to factory settings. Luckily for him, all of his data was on another partition (D drive) so nothing was affected, just about a few hours for the recovery disks and deleting bloatware.

 

I don't have the recovery disks.