My 6 year old Sony Vaio that has been chugging along as a media and general purpose PC, now seems to be failing.
The other day it was starting up and then after the windows loading screen and before the password screen it had a BSOD. Sometimes it would just hang and not BSOD so I put in my password and then the HDD activity light would flicker followed by a BSOD.
So today I took the HDD out and put it into a netbook to see if I could get files from it before doing a format and reinstall. It would instantly BSOD after the windows loading screen while in the netbook so I then put the HDD into my PC as a slave and then retrieved the files and formatted the drive.
After this put it back in the old laptop and started to do a fresh install. It copied the files from the CD and restarted to do the installation. After the windows loading screen came up the screen went blank and it has not come back. I suspect the setup screen is waiting for input but I cannot see it. The monitor is brighter than as if the power was off so that is unlikely the issue.
The GPU is a Nvidia 7400 Go.
I will attempt to attach a monitor to the VGA output tomorrow but it would be nice to get some opinions to help narrow down the issue. I think the BSOD was caused by a messy HDD which I was planning on doing a fresh install on anyway.
The other day it was starting up and then after the windows loading screen and before the password screen it had a BSOD. Sometimes it would just hang and not BSOD so I put in my password and then the HDD activity light would flicker followed by a BSOD.
So today I took the HDD out and put it into a netbook to see if I could get files from it before doing a format and reinstall. It would instantly BSOD after the windows loading screen while in the netbook so I then put the HDD into my PC as a slave and then retrieved the files and formatted the drive.
After this put it back in the old laptop and started to do a fresh install. It copied the files from the CD and restarted to do the installation. After the windows loading screen came up the screen went blank and it has not come back. I suspect the setup screen is waiting for input but I cannot see it. The monitor is brighter than as if the power was off so that is unlikely the issue.
The GPU is a Nvidia 7400 Go.
I will attempt to attach a monitor to the VGA output tomorrow but it would be nice to get some opinions to help narrow down the issue. I think the BSOD was caused by a messy HDD which I was planning on doing a fresh install on anyway.