Sony SZ Unmountable Boot Error

Hi All - got a problem with my SZ440 laptop. All was well until yesterday when I opened it from suspend mode with very little battery - as it was booting up it shut down in the middle of the sequence. I didn't think anything of it until later after I plugged it in and tried to restart. It would go through a restart loop of the VAIO screen, a few seconds of the XP logo, then flash blue screen and repeat. I used F8 to disable auto restart and saw that the blue screen is giving me an unmountable boot error. From some research it looks like I need to enter recovery mode to run chkdsk, but safe modes aren't working either. I don't have an XP disc so I'm in the process of trying to create one. I do have an Ubuntu disc and I was able to boot up with that in trial mode. I was also able to access my files and start pulling some off in case it is FUBAR. Any tips here? I'm hoping once I burn an ISO of the XP disc I can use the recovery console and try and repair the disc, but I'm wondering why Ubuntu can read the files (seemingly) just fine? I'm a novice when it comes to other OS so maybe I'm just missing something.

Thanks!
Adam

 

I think your doing everything perfect so far. I would use the ubuntu cd to access the disk and copy everything that is important to an external drive just in case the hdd is failing. The error could be a disk error affecting XP startup. Get an XP cd and boot to recovery console then try running a CHKDSK /R .