Vista laptop that just won't boot

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One of my friend's sister brought me her Sony Vaio laptop, telling me it has a virus or something. This POS runs Vista... and a Vista that just won't boot, no less.

I tried the usual safe mode, no results. I get a black screen and a mouse pointer that stupidly remains there. There's some sign of loading for a while, but nothing more. I could leave it like that for hours and it still wouldn't change a damn thing. Normally booting it yields the same exact result.

I have a Vista DVD on hand... so I attempted to fix it. It looked like it might just work, but whatddya know, same damn thing.

I admit I know squat about Vista. Had next to no time to learn it at school, either.

So before considering Plan D - Destroy, Erase, Improve - any input's welcome. I can get screenshots if need be.

 

Let me say this: Despite all its vices, Vista's installation is very user friendly. Even a RAID 0 installation was a piece of cake, detected drivers and drives immediately.

Considering this - when Vista's boot DVD doesn't kick life into the computer it is conceivable that it might indeed be a virus that had killed the MBR, or, imo as likely, that perhaps something with the drive itself is wrong (like, did sis kick around her notebook a fair bit, like in a rucksack or car?). Sometimes HDD's fail (as in: fast moving parts, tight tolerances, fragile structures).

My advice, would be to take the HDD out, and check whether it works on a working computer. That's what I would do with a desktop computer. I know nothing of notebooks. I never opened up one. So, as it is a notebook, I'd send it in to Sony and let them fix it

 

So it won't boot to the DVD either? That's odd.

Have you tryed restoring all the defaults in the BIOS and then going back in and selecting the DVD drive as the first boot device?

 

Kit is right.

I now think that it is most certainly not a virus. I didn't think that through. Vista on installation would simply overwrite whatever crap there is on the MBR, tabula rasa. So when Vista can't boot, it must be something else.

Can you access the BIOS? What does it say about the drives in the laptop, HDD and CD drive? More info please.

 

I don't think the MBR is broken either, because it gets to the point where it finds the cursor image (or can even make screenshot images.) My guess is that it is a software error, two very important services that have entered a deadlock or something to that effect. Did she recently install an antivirus application?

If you are going to reinstall Vista, you might try to mount the C disk using a Linux live CD and backup the important files. That way, nothing important gets lost during a reinstall.

 

BIOS works A-1. The specs, though, are some of the most cryptic crap I ever seen -

Hard disk drive: 160GB
System memory: 2048MB (Two gigs of RAM)

The rest of the menus are BS. In the boot menu, the HD is "Internal Hard Drive Disk"... WTF!!!

Booting on the Vista DVD was no problem either... I tried repairing, didn't help.

And Morgs, I have no clue about a recent antivirus installation. I was given minimal info for this job. I believe they didn't needed to give me any info since I'm a "professional in my domain". Do a simple task like reinstalling and backing up data and you become a freaking living and breathing greek god.

More seriously, there isn't much info I can give here... the BIOS was incredibly cryptic, I cannot boot in Safe mode, System restoration didn't work either, and if I try to fix the startup problems, Vista tells me I'm a dumb mofo because everything "went normally". Running out of ideas over here.

 

Get a sledge hammer and have some fun...

Seriously though, you should be able to do a completely new install with Vista by changing the Bios to boot from the CD/DVD drive. If you are able to get the Vista disc to boot than do a complete reinstall and explain to your sis, if that is correct, that it was either looses what she saved or the PC.

Good luck!

 

Uhh, okay, this is one of the weirdest things ever.

So I boot in "Repair my computer", and I see some Vaio recovery or something like that. For some obscure reason, I was able to restore from a snapshot in December that appeared when Office was installed. I checked it with two antiviruses -- AVG and avast! -- in safe mode, of course, what do you know, nothing. Spyboy didn't find anything either. I'll check for Windows updates later tonight.

Looks like it's back running as a champ, thanks to that recovery tool, however I still don't understand what was the *exact* cause of the problem.

 

Get rid of one of the anti-virusses. One suffices.

 

Yes, I kicked AVG to the curb and left avast. As mind boggling as it is, this laptop is squeaky clean. She appearantly made backups of her data -- good thing.

The part that pisses me off is STILL not knowing the cause of the problem!

 

could of been a currupt registry or any number of problems and that restore point was factory made trust me. it was on a different spot on the hard drive then from the partition that vista sees