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Sony Vaio laptop will not restore.

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8 replies

by macgyver.hicks

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I have a Vaio laptop PCG-FX215 that I'm working on. The owner reformatted the hard drive with fdisk. Afterwards, it would not load the restore CD. It gives the error of "No fixed disk present." At first, I thought it was the hard drive, I replaced it with a new one. It gave me the same error. The BIOS shows that it's able to read the drives. I have put the drives into other systems and they load fine. I put them back into the laptop and nothing. The Recovery CD has some image files to load on the drive, and I think they have to be put on there in DOS mode in order for the laptop to be able to read from the drive. I haven't been able to figure out the way to put in the DOS string get that to happen. I hope someone here can help me.

8 replies

by sonnguyen

If the bios can see the drive, make sure that this is by selecting auto mode in the primary ide in the bios. Of course the jumper or jumperless of the drive is at the correct setting.
One this is done boot the system up with a win 98 diskett and run fdisk to create partition. Power down and reboot again with win98 floppy to format the drive (fat32). Boot the system up again with the master CD1 ensuring first boot is CD Drive. FAT32 can easily be converted to NTFS if the o/s is Win XP later on.
If for some bizzare reason that the drive is seen in Bios but not Dos there may be some sort of Soft IDE program installed on the drive, try fdisk /mbr at A prompt then run fdisk. If Dos still can not see the drive you must use debug.exe to clear the drive from all soft controller. Debug.exe is found in Win 95 boot disk if you need this far please let me know I will send all the commands or seach the net for them.

by macgyver.hicks

fdisk says, "no fixed disk present". I booted up in DOS mode with a Win98 boot, then accessed the Recovery CD. It has 2 directories, [image] [sony]. Inside sony there are, blitter.lng, restorer.exe, & vssver.scc. When I try to run restorer.exe it gives me a "Usage" list. Usage: RESTORER - @ source drive number (1,2,3) and partition index (1,2,3) image path(s), default extension: .IMG
options:
-v - verbose
-f - reset "ImproperShutdown" flag"
-t - display given text file at the end of the restoring
-l - save a restoring result in the specified file
-d= - change DriveNumber field in the target partition's BPB to "d". "d" should be a hexidecimal number (80, 81,...)

by bobho

A couple of options to try:

1. Create 2 partitions and then try the recovery.
2. Remove ALL partitions and then try the recovery.

Sony seems a bit anal on how they handle their systems. Per their website, the hard disk on the fx215 cannot even be replaced (seems strange but I don't know if this is actually the case or not). During recovery, if no partitions are found then the recovery process supposedly will create 2 partitions. If 2 partitions are found then it will supposedly use those2 partitions. I don't know what will happen if only 1 partition is found (and this may be the issue).

If you want to change partition information after the recovery then try something like Partition Magic.

Here's a good viao website:

http://www.myplc.com/sony/index.htm

and here's Sony's site:

http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/pc/pcgfx210fx215/

Good luck,

DrBob:>)

by macgyver.hicks

I would repartition the drive if DOS would see it. I've even put the drive into another system, partitioned and reformatted it and it is still unrecognized by the Restorer program on the recovery CD. I need the string to transfer the sonyd.img image in the Image directory to the hard drive. If I can do that, I think I could get some things going. Thanks for trying.

by anthonyjj

Hi,
I work for NEC computers Australia, and we have clients that call with similar problems.

0NEC have what’s called a EXTHS (extended hidden sector) on their systems which may explain what’s happing here with the SONY.

if the EXTHS on the HDD does not match what’s been written to the DMI of the bios you basically have a dead machine where you cannot access the H/W, this happens if they install a different OS on the unit or from viruses. Laptops don’t have room onthe bios to write this info to the DMI so we use a NEC recover floppy disk, which is specific for that unit. This is what may be needed here.

You may be able to acquire one of these disks from SONY. Boot the system with the Sony rec floppy accessthe HDD through FDISK delete all partitions and then recover.

There would be no special singular command that would do the above process.

hope this helps

by macgyver.hicks

Though this may be true, Sony does not release any such information to non-Sony tech's. and they certainly don't offer anything online. Thanks for trying.

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