Many thanks for letting me join. Old Sony Vaio laptop user with an old person using it occasionally.
Full story is that I've got a really old Vaio PCG-7Q6P running XP. Son-in-law pulled it out of a skip many years ago. Runs great with no issues up until now. I believe the hard drive as crashed. Had the dreaded Blue screen with Unmoutable message. It would stop after the initial Vaio display and then stopped loading Windows from that point. Done the F8 interception and got it to the Advance setup screen and tried Safe Mode load. It would go through the set up sequence and stop at /sys. So at this point, I tried to reload Windows XP from the disc. This got me to point where I could reformat the hard drive. Got to near the end and said it couldn't format the hard drive.
This was followed by a squealing noise so my guess is that the hard drive could now get past the point of where it was allowed to get to by the systems not allowing Windows to load. So my logic believes the hard-drive as given up the ghost. I've got a cheapo used drive coming but also got my eye on a brand new 'other' drive. That's when I'll see if I can reload Windows and the other stuff I need and see if I can get it going again. I've got a recovery disc, drivers disc and if needs be, the XP discs. Only issue I can think of will be reloading the initial Vaio stuff.
Going back to the laptop itself, it's been great for having car diagnostic stuff and using an endoscope when tinkering on the cars. In all honesty, that's all I used the Vaio for. Brilliant because I didn't need to worry about keeping it clean etc.
