So my laptop had a rest...

reap-a-rat

and now it's kaputt!

I was away for the Summer. Before I left, my laptop had a few problems, mainly down to the fact that that I had installed Windows 7 instead of Vista and some of the drivers were missing and hard to get a hold of. However, I could still work with it. By the way, its a Sony Vaio VGN-NS20E, for the record !

Anyway, I came home and it was running a little slow. I thought fair enough, it's cold after being off for so long, we'll give it a chance. But since, anytime I boot it can't last very long without freezing if any applications are open. Also, a couple of times now I've seen "Microsoft Windows is not responding". Not good :O! Most of the time I have to manually shut down, which isn't great for the laptop I know! But I can't do anything else.

So I decided (since I can get free licence keys through my college course) that I would install Windows 7 again. There is nothing important on the hard-drive and if there was, I have got storage options. But anyhow, Idownloaded the image on another computer, because I couldn't trust mine to stay on that long, and I burned it to a formatted DVD with imgburn. Everything went fine and dandy. Then I put it into the Vaio, and it never gave me the option to boot from disk, and wouldn't do it automatically. So I managed to turn the laptop on anyway and when I looked at the disk it was empty! I'm running out of DVDs, and while I was checking more to see if they were empty or not I found the disk I had used to install Windows 7 on my brothers laptop. Now, I knew that had worked previously so I thought there was no reason it shouldn't work for me now.

On boot, it went to the windows is loading files screen, but it couldn't load them, and encouraged me to repair the hard-drive, but when I clicked enter it kept going back and over between the same two screens!

I really am at a loss with what to do. Any advice you can give me would be appreciated! Sorry if I have left anything out, I'm in a bit of a hurry writing this! Thanks !

Zapho

Sorry, I don't have much time to help, but just a thought occured to me about your DVDs. I was trying to boot a friends computer recently using a special boot disk (Ultimate Boot CD Windows) but for some reason, it wouldn't boot - however, it worked fine on my laptop and several other machines I tried. I boiled this down to a 64bit/32bit discrepency - for some reason, that disk doesn't work in 64bit machines but works no problem in 32bit machines. So maybe you're having the same problem? Worth a check to see that you're using
the right versions.

And another thing - how did you try to boot from the DVD? Did you use a special boot menu or change a bios setting.

Also, to save DVDs you can also copy the image to a USB key and boot of that! You'll find loads of info by googling - a free program called Universal-USB-Installer lets you install loads of OSs from a usb, including windows 7.

Hope this helps!

Allyall

Also may be worth downloading this HDD Regenerator 2011 Trial Version, Just to check your Hard Drive isn't the problem.

reap-a-rat

Allyall wrote: »

Also may be worth downloading this HDD Regenerator 2011 Trial Version, Just to check your Hard Drive isn't the problem.

Thanks for both replies already, it has just registered with me now that I was having hard-drive problems last year. When I went to get it fixed, they were stumped, didn't know what the problem was. In the end it kinda just resolved itself, but obviously not!

themonic

Allyall wrote: »

Also may be worth downloading this HDD Regenerator 2011 Trial Version, Just to check your Hard Drive isn't the problem.

Just for check, but never for "repair"