Partition / Boot issue: VAIO FZ

Man, it's been a pretty bad weekend.

So I got my new sony vaio fz laptop (with windows vista) on friday and was having a blast... until I decided to create a partition so that I could instal windows xp on it too. I would normally use Partition Magic 8, but this was incompatible with vista, so I downloaded some free trial partition software that I forgot the name of. I set my partition to give me a separate 15GB space for WinXP, and it asked me to restart before performing the actions. Once it restarted though, I got an error before booting windows:

"NTLDR is missing. press cntrl + alt + delete to restart."

Frantically searching the internet for a solution, I found none that dealt with windows vista. I called sony and they tried to run me through restoring the machine to factory default using some hidden partition with the backup files that I got to by pressing F10 at startup. When we tried to restore the c:\ drive, it gave the error:

"Cannot find the volume drive."

So they said they would send me a cd that would restore everything, and it would take 7-10 business days to reach me (OMFG). Somehow I don't really think this cd will work if the backup partition couldn't find the c:\ drive. However, the hard drive does seem to be detected by the BIOS. I downloaded ubuntu live cd from my desktop and ran the partition utility on my laptop, but everything I tried resulted in no success, and now I get a missing kernel error. When inserting an installation cd of WinXP, it doesn't recognize any hard drive at all for installing the OS to.

So basically I'm sitting here trying to figure out what I can download to reconfigure my hard drive so that I can install windows xp, since 7-10 days is damn long for that restore disk to come. Anyone have any ideas?

 

First of all, its seems like your boot sector has been corrupted. Go to the recovery console and type: fixboot. Hope this helps.

 

What recovery console? And Sony's little recovery partition is pretty much gone now..

 

I read somewhere that you have to get some files from another Vista, and paste it in the same place, google "NLTDR Error" or something, or you would just have to reinstall the whole OS. Don't think you can make partitions when you already have a OS, hard drive has to be formatted first.

 

Try using MBRTool and edit the partition table to make the Vista partition boot first. In the menu, select option 6: other options -> option 6: partition table management -> Disk 0 -> Original -> Partition 1 (I am guessing this is the Vista partition. If not, try to find it.) > Activate -> De-activate the other partitions.

To have Windows XP detect the hard drive, you must either slipstream the SATA drivers to a Windows XP image or install the SATA drivers during the Windows setup by pressing F6 when asked. An external floppy drive is required if you want to do the latter method. Download the "Floppy Configuration Utility for Intel® Matrix Storage Manager" from this link.

 

Basically, my hard drive's clean as a whistle now. Nothing on it, and I'm using a Mandriva Live cd right now. Bogart, that link isn't working for me.

If anyone has any way of helping me get from basically scratch to installing my copy of windows xp, please help. When I put it in, it tells me there's no hard drive to install windows, and I've tried reformatting it to NTFS using Mandriva's partition software.

 

You probably are missing the SATA recognition drivers on your XP CD. Try this link on how to add them in via slipstreaming. I haven't done it myself, so I can't say it works. Might want to back up your XP CD first just in case.

7-10 days seems really long for shipping out a CD IMO. When I needed an OS recovery day from HP it didn't take that long - I think it was 3 days. My OS got messed up by trying to partition, too . But I was using Partition Magic. Like in your case, the recovery partition didn't help, but the CD they sent did.

 

Thanks for the help guys. Still can't get it working though. Looks like I'll just have to wait till my recovery cd comes.

 

Hi Guys ! I tried download and created Floppy driver using F6 while install Windows and i had fix this problem . I use Sony Vaio FZ190N4 , and now i can made dual boot Win Vista and XP . It's work ok . You can try download file form this link :
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/fil...XP+Professional&lang=eng&strOSs=44&submit=Go!
Hope this help !

 

i have this same problem i have the fresh hdd (completely blank/formatted) i have installed windows vista but now when i take the vista disk out after the sony vaio splash screen nothing happens just a white dot flashing at the top left of screen, when i go on the vista recovery disk then load drivers it says i have a C drive, E drive and an X drive called boot. if i leave vista disk in it says press any key to boot from cd or just freezes. cant access bios, recovery...nothing at all please help.

 

You have to be using XP initially if you want to dual boot. You cannot install XP on a vista machine, you can only install Vista on an XP machine.

 

Not so. You CAN do it, but you have to jump through a few hoops afterwards. XP hoses up the boot process for Vista, but it is fairly easy to fix. There are a couple of threads here with the specifics.

Gary