VAIO FZ145E Installing VISTA

I’m trying to reinstall Vista to my wife’s Sony Vaio FZ 145e laptop using the recovery disks(2) that we created when she first got the laptop.

Here’s what happened. She was working on the laptop and the screen went black. Rebooted and the boot was stuck at the boot screen. To see what the problem was I booted into safe mode step by step boot, and the boot hung at the CRCDISK.SYS file. Tried all the restore and recovery options and nothing worked.

Last night I removed the hard drive and was able to transfer the files I wanted to my desktop using a SATA-USB adapter. I than reinstalled the hard drive, booted using Recovery Disk #1, went into VAIO Recovery Option and wiped/formatted the hard drive using the write 0’s option. My plan was to than boot using the Recovery options and do a complete restore. This is where I’m having a problem.

First thing I notice when booting using the recovery disk (#1) is the message “ SMART Failure Predicted in Hard Disk 2: TOSHIBA MK1637GSX-(S1) WARNING: Immediately back-up your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent. Press F1 to continue”.

Pressing F1 results in the message, “Windows is loading files”. Next I get a “System Recovery Option” window with the option to select a keyboard layout. I choose US and hit next which opens another ‘System Recovery Options” window. It states “ Select an operating system to repair and click Next. Only Windows Vista operating systems are listed and can be repaired. If you do not see your operating system listed, click Load Drivers to load drivers for your hard disks.”

There is no OS listed, but if I select Load Drivers a window appears that says, “ Insert the installation media for the device and click OK to select the driver.” When I select OK a directory opens but I’m not sure where what file type and location to look for. The default file type is “setup information”. There are two possible location, the Boot (X drive or the CD Drive(D Recovery Disk 1.

I tried the recovery disk(#1) but I’m not sure of the file type and location to look for. The default location when the directory initially opened was the ‘”system32” folder.

If I select the “Next” option a Systems Recovery Options window opens with six choices:
1. Startup Repair
2. System Restore
3. Windows Complete PC Restore
4. Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool
5. Command Prompt
6. VAIO Recovery Center

When I choose the VAIO Recovery, there are another six options:
1. Windows System restore
2. VAIO hardware Diagnosis
3. Restore C: Drive
4. Restore Complete System
5. Rescue Data
6. Wipe and Erase Data

I chose option 4, select Start, restore c: Drive, check I Understand, select Start, and get a message “Your system drive is too small or may not exist. Select restore Complete System to perform a complete system recovery”. This is where I originally started.

When I ran option 2, Hardware Diagnosis, the HDD test indicates that no error was detected.

Sorry, for the long post but I want to provide as much detail as possible. Any assistance is appreciated.

 

It looks like the hard drive had failed.

 

I booted into the command prompt and the ran DISKPART.

Here are the results.'

1) List Disk

Disk 0 149 GB 1849kb free

2) List Volume

Volume 1 C NTFS Partition 7115MB Healthy
Volume 2 D NTFS Partition 142GB Healthy

3) List Partition Disk 0

Partition 1 Primary 7115 MB 1024kb offset
Partition 2 Primary 142GB 7116MB free


I'm thinking that the problem may be with formatting the drive or the partitions. Any thoughts?

 

Your problem is right here:

The drive is failing. Time to replace it. The two partitons look right, after atempting to do a complete restore. The first one is where it was about to create the replacement "Restore Partition", the second one is where it would attempt to restore the OS.

Gary

 

Drive is bad.

 

I don't know much about hard drives but if the drive is bad why was I able to transfer files to me desktop using a SATA-USB adapter? I was alos able to read to partitions and capacity?

Is there a test I can run to verify a bad drive before I buy a new drive?

 

You need to read and understand what SMART is about. The hard drive's own built in software is telling you the drive is failing. The test has already been run, it continuously runs while the drive is in operation. Time to buy a new hard drive.

Gary