Sony Vaio disk partitions
by Pierre Boisvenue. 24/05/2007 1:58:34 PM
My experience yesterday with the Sony Vaio laptop was painful. First, all I wanted to know was if the laptop contained 2 memory sticks. Sometime the BIOS information screen will relay this information. I did not remember which HOT key to press, and by accident hit on the SYSTEM restore key F10. I figure, no problem, I will simply cancel out once the restore application loads up. Well, the simple act of pressing F10 at boot up, and by the way nothing is clearly indicated on the boot up screen as to what keys does what, rendered my laptop out of commission. All I got back at boot up was some weird junk characters on screen and the system would not longer boot. So I figure how could SONY render my laptop unusable by just pressing a single key at a particular time?
So off I went, using another PC of course, to try and understand what happened and why.
That means gaining an understanding of a computer system boot process, Master Boot Record and disk partitions. After some reading I figured that perhaps all that happened was the ACTIVE partition got switched. Since this is a laptop without a floppy disk I figured I could simply plug in a USB floppy drive and boot from it since it works on my HP Desktop. But Nooooo! Can’t boot from a USB floppy on a Sony VAIO. Now I remembered reading a while back about Bootable CD’s in that it provides the door into booting my laptop that was out of commission. A bootable CD is not something I had handy and had to do more reading on how to create one. So off I went and created DOS bootable CD and booted my laptop. So big deal here I am sitting at the A: prompt scratching my head thinking maybe that I could now use my USB floppy drive to launch partition magic and see if my hunch is correct in that there has been a ACTIVE partition switch. But Nooooo! I could not find out yet because my USB drive was not recognized within DOS.
Then I remembered way back in the DOS days where one could use the good old FDISK utility. It asked about enabling large disk support and all and proceeded to switch ACTIVE partition. Removed the Boot CD and Eureka ! My system restored. All this pain for a simple F10 key press.
Sony VAIO, Hard Disk, SATA, eSata, USB External Drive, Backup, Ghost, Disk Image
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