my friend has a sony vaio laptop and when he goes to start it up, a black screen comes up with the wording error loading operating system the laptop has windows xp built in to the harddrive can anyone give me any advice to help him out
Either the OS is corrupt or the drive has been formatted. Try to see if you can get into safe mode, if not then your screwed.
You need to do a chkdsk c: /f . If the computer had an abnormal shutdown, it might have corrupted some system files, a chkdsk can usually fix this and make the computer bootable again.
how does he get it to start in safe mode and no he has no recovery disk,and we don't no how to do a chkdsk check any help would be great thanks,the only thing i have is a windows xp disk for my pc
The best way is to use your windows xp installation cd to make a bartpe bootcd. The bartpe will allow you to run a chkdsk from the command line or even a scandisk from one of the utilitys inside the bartpe. You can also use your windows installation cd to try and get into the dos window to run a chkdsk. But you have to be careful because if you go to the wrong screen the cd will try to install windows on the computer. The bartpe is safer and doesn't take that long to make. If you can't get a chkdsk or scandisk running on the computer or it won't fix it, You can try the free "testdisk" it has the capabilty of fixing hard disk corruption. It is more powerful than chkdsk but I would only use that if chkdsk fails to repair the computer. Testdisk can be downloaded on a livecd and should boot most computers. Testdisk also has a addon called "photrec" it is a recovery program that will recover all files from the hard drive in case the corruption isn't fixable. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
that is to tecnical for me can you explain it in more detail please like which file to download which one to burn and does it go in the laptap before start up sorry for being an arse
