Redstaar

Hello all.

The problem I am having is that my laptop (Sony VAIO VGN-NR11S) does not detect the installed hard drive, and when I insert my Vista disc it will not load so I cannot perform any kind of diagnostic.

I tried to clean the laptop out earlier on today by running a format on the hard drive. The format froze half way through which required me to do a manual restart. After doing this I can only get as far as BIOS. The laptop tells me that 'BOOTMGR' is missing, and after some reading I find the only way to sort this out is to insert the Vista disc and choose the repair option. Like I said before my Vista disc will not load so I cannot perform the repair.

My laptop does not have a floppy drive so I cannot even create a boot disk or even run chkdisc to re-configure the hard drive. Even if I plug in my extrnal USB hard drive and try a clean installation it does not detect it. I even tried using my Win XP disc to just try and get an installation up and running in order for me to detect and rectify the problem, but it still does not identify the hard drive.

Are there any kind of hardware diagnostic tools that I can run outside of Windows? It seems that this is the only option left. Also, if it is possible, how would I run this diagnostic tool outside of windows?

Thanks in advance for any help recieved

TriggerFinger

hi,

i am not quite sure what you are trying to do (fresh install, repair, etc.) but it seems to me that your hard drive is gone. have you tried another hard drive (a known working drive)?

check the link on my sig (HDD diagnostic tools) and it will give you a list of diagnostic tools depending on the brand of HDD that you are using. some of the tools have ISO image that can be burned into a blank CD. that CD can be bootable so you can run the tool outside of Windows.