VAIO PCG-71211L won't boot from Windows 7 install disc

Hi,

I'm new to Sony laptops in general, hoping someone can shade some light on my issue. I just recently bought and installed a new hard drive in this laptop, as the old one was throwing errors left and right and rapidly failing over the past week, I couldn't even complete a chkdsk scan without it freezing.

So I installed the new hard drive, go into bios to make sure CD drive is top boot priority, throw in my Windows 7 CD and reboot... into a black screen with the words "Operating system not found." Well no joke, I'm trying to install it now. But the laptop refuses to boot from the CD. Interestingly, it DOES boot from the CD when I put in a disc with memtest.

Anyone else had an issue like this? Failing any way to get the laptop to accept Windows installation on it's own, would it be possible to hook the new laptop hard drive up to my desktop PC, install windows, and somehow get it to work on the laptop again?

Thanks for your help!

 

What (exact) laptop model are you talking about?

Have you tried booting into the bios and changing the boot order to CD first?

Another option would be to boot and install win7 from a flash drive..

would it be possible to hook the new laptop hard drive up to my desktop PC, install windows, and somehow get it to work on the laptop again?
No, this usually never works for windows because when it installs it sets the OS HAL to the specific hardware during install.

 

Press F11 I believe on your PC to get the Boot Devices list on power on and select the CD drive and you should be good to go. Sony uses F11 I think, most other companies use F12 key try F9 - F12, anyways right after you power on repeatedly press until a menu comes up showing available boot devices. If that doesn't work you Windows CD might not be bootable and you can install from a USB flash drive.