Problem with laptop

scouse · 14 Sep 2006 at 15:51

I have a friend's Sony Vaio laptop here, and it wont boot into windows XP. When booting I get the XP loading screen and then a blue screen saying unmountable_boot_volume.

I have tried booting in safe mode but that brings up the same screen. I have read around, and most places suggest using recovery console, or formatting. I tried this but I can't get the laptop to boot from the cd drive - there are no internal drives, just a dock with floppy/cd drive.

So does anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks in advance,
Rich.

scouse · 15 Sep 2006 at 21:08

Ok, finally managed to get a fresh install on the hard drive; I connected the lappy hdd to my desktop using an ide converter and put XP onto it. (Turns out the cd-rom on the dock is faulty).

Only problem is, when I replace the hdd back into the lappy, I get 'operating system not found', even though I could run it on my pc.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Rich.

Day03 · 15 Sep 2006 at 22:26

This is because you have installed the OS based on the hardware in your own PC , the laptop is completely different and the OS will not work when you swap it back into the laptop. Get a working CD-rom drive, set in the BIOS to boot from CD first and install it again.

scouse · 15 Sep 2006 at 23:29

Ahh right, cheers mate. Will have to sort that out.

Thanks,
Rich.