HELP! My SZ wont boot up!

heya fellas!

a strange thing happened to my lappy yesterday night.. i just transfered some pics frm my digicam to the SZ ans then powered it off. Everything went smooth. Later, after half an hour, i powered it ON, and to my horror, all of a suddden, i kept restarting itself after the XP startup screen and a blue dos window pops up for 1-2 secs and it restarts.. this goes on and on..! I have taken a pic of the error message. Can anyone help me figure out what the problem is? got important data on my hdd! for reference, i m posting a pic of the error msg as well as a video of the startup! pls help me! I am stranded without my vaio as it has my project related work!

heres the pic:


and the vid:
http://rapidshare.com/files/47371214/MOV00001.3gp.html

 

That ain't good...
Have you tried booting in safe mode? (press F8 repeatedly after the bios posts)


Is this XP or Vista?


**edit, got your video to work, XP it is.

You need to get in somehow, if safe mode doesn't get you there, you are pretty well screwed. Need to take the drive to another machine and use it to pull your data off. Or you can reinstall the OS.
The danger of reinstalling the OS is that you are writing to the drive. If you have corruption you will have destroyed the data.

Do you know if you use fat32 or NTFS?

If you can get into safe mode, go to Start->My Computer (RMB) ->properties ->Advanced ->Startup & recovery and uncheck the 'automatically restart'.

After that, reboot again and it should BSOD at the hardware/driver that's giving it fits. Then you'll know what you need to fix.

 

By my recollection, a phyisical dump of memory is either RAM or OS related, not hard drive. When I had 2 back sticks of ram I got this all the time. Also, when my OS became corrupt, I would get some message like that during bootup then crash and start all over again.

Try to burn Memtest86+ on a cd on another machine and boot of that. It will go thru several memory tests and see if it is you ram.

I say tho that the hard drive seems fine. If it had gone bad, you would've have just received a message saying no hard drive found. Try going into the BIOS and see if it still recognizes the drive. If it does, then it's fine and your data should be all there. That way you can always transfer out the important files.

If it sees the HDD and the RAM is good, I think you can safely say its ur OS being corrupt.

 

well.. tried booting in safe mode and also with command prompt... it wont work! is there no option to start the recovery console b4 the OS loads?

@ adinu.. i think its just the OS.. coz XP does boot up but i wont get the login screen.. that indicates that both hdd and ram seem to be OK.. but i dont wanna lose my data.. tell me, if i get an XP setup cd and run the repair option frm the recovery console, is it of any help? seems just sm imp file got corrupt!

 

One nasty little trick XP does is reallocate drive letters. I've had this happen more than once. It's particularly bad on some legacy machines which treat SATA as a secondary drive and load IDEs first. XP boots and rejuggles drive letters, then it's half way thru boot and barfs.
I've never been able to find any way to fix it (including paid support from M$ and always had to reinstall OS and all apps.)

I would most defiantly do the Memtest86 as that's a good thing to do anyway - then you rule out the ram. The Bios mem test is not thorough enough to detect most errors.

XP recovery console is only useful if you made recovery disks. If you didn't, it's useless.

Which SZ model is this? Did it come with XP? Have you tried Sony's support? (that ought to be good for a couple laughs)

 

You will need a Windows XP CD to access the recovery console then follow the manual steps in this knowledge base article.

 

hey but that article has a warning!!

Warning Do not use the procedure that is described in this article if your computer has an OEM-installed operating system. The system hive on OEM installations creates passwords and user accounts that did not exist previously. If you use the procedure that is described in this article, you may not be able to log back into the recovery console to restore the original registry hives.

Doesnt this apply to my vaio?

Also, i have one more prob.. in one of the articles, i read that i can use a Windows XP cd to repair my installation. I do have a cd, but my SZ wont boot from it! How do i goby i? coz i cant figure out how to bring up the bios in vaios!

 

I don't believe Sony creates custom user accounts on their pre-installed OS for SZs, so you should be all right.

What type of Windows CD do you have? Press F2 when the VAIO logo appears during boot up to access the BIOS and make sure that the DVD drive has higher boot priority than the hard drive.

 

Thanks for your reply. Well, i haven't created recovery DVD's for it! So, i have a normal XP installation CD in which i can use the serial supplied by sony.

Also, figured out the BIOS... the opt. drive is at a higher priority, but i guess its the CD thats not bootable so will try for a bootable XP disk tomorrow..

And i just had a chat with th sony online support... i think those ppl are good for nothing! :x The only solution he gave was to perform system recovery and took a hell lot of time to say that! Well, that is really not worth listening, is it??

I found some links:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B830084&SD=SONY
&
http://icrontic.com/articles/repair_windows_xp

the first one states that this problem occurs while installing windows, but in my case, it was running fine.. the error is the same as i am getting here.
The second link gives an idea how to repair the registry. I wonder if this is the solution to my problem.

 

Hi
i had the exact same problem with my laptop a few days ago after i cleaned my registry

this link worked for me:
http://www.bootcd.us/BartPE_Plugin_Details/533/RegFix-Plugin.html

follow the steps and you should be fine.

 

hey.. thanks for the link, man! will try it out by tomorrow and post the results.

was wondering if there is any way to boot through a pen-drive? using this utility

 

Yes there is!
You just need the Windows installation files from a cd or your hard drive (NOT the one your currently running on ie. c:\windows)

You can find the guide here:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-5928902.html

 

This is exactly what happened to my FS. I powered it down then turned it on the next day and got the same message with it automatically restarting. First if it has not gone through that cycle more than five times try to boot in to the last known good config, if you have tried to boot it more than five times it won't work, that includes safe mode, and the restart cycle that the computer is taking you through.

If that does not work you are screwed man. your only option is to reinstall the OS to factory defaults. That is what I had to do. It has nothing to do with the ram. it is all to do with the HDD and the OS.

Once your back up and running remember to back up your system, and copy your important files to a thumb drive.

So sorry about your situation!

Don

 

if it's a software issue then:

-just do what has bogart suggested (with xp disks enter the recovery console and choose recover windows).

- or if you don't have the recovery disk then press F10 upon start then choose the option to recover

if either of these steps didn't work then think of hardware. maybe ram got unseated. any mods to the hardware before this happened?

 

hey thanks for that link, smhuk!! it worked indeed!

but still m not trouble-free once i did it as u said, it did start.. worked fine... as it was working earlier... then again after charging it, i shut it down! And when i start it jus now, this time even the xp bootup didnt come... it says after a really long time that "Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

Now. when i tried using BartPE again, as given in the instruction. the recent folder was RP58.. now it is RP59.. which one do i use to get it back working again? Thanks again for ur help...

well, i guess this will be the last resort... read my above post.. i m very annoyed with this laps behaviour! :x

it still stock.. no changes.. just 7 months old!

 

"Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"


Got that before on my desktop.

I got into safemode and ended up doing a system restore I believe to a previous restore date.

 

ok.. i got 1 more query..

given that i m in the same state as i mentioned; i.e. i cant boot into windows even from safe mode, if i have an external USB hard disk, is there any way that i can copy my data from the laptop to the external hdd?

any bootable cd software that will help in this case?

 

Try download a KNOPPIX live CD. I have used it myself on my SZ650 to get data off onto an external USB drive just in case my Vista repair didn't work. The Linux format is a tad bit different, but do-able.

 

well.. more bad news!

backed up my data (used Bart PE to transfer files onto my external HDD.. none of the linux bootcd's worked.. h/w incompability maybe!) and restored the laptop to factory settings. Everything went fine.. process done succesfully and asked to restart. I did so and next during bootup, i got a message that "HDD S.M.A.R.T test failed. Hard disk failure is imminent. Back up all your data"

Does this mean that my disk is gone bad? Should i claim for a replacement or can this issue be solved? is it some software/bios problem or what? I'm confused!