Well I spent 3K on a VAIO A170P 1.5 years ago to bring to college. It's been nothing but trouble and unfortunately my warranty was only 1 year so I'm screwed. Although I've loved Sony in the past I will never get another PC from them as they've virtually stolen $3,000 from me.So my current problem. My hard drive died over the weekend. It was giving me trouble but I could get it to boot after messing with it for awhile and I backed up some smaller files onto my thumb drive. Unfortunately though, I was in the process of moving and had already sent my large external hard drive home so there is a lot I couldn't pull off at the time.
I don't think there is any hope of it booting again with that hard drive so I need some way of salvaging some stuff off of it. After the VAIO animation, it displays a blank screen for a couple minutes before says Primary Disk Error, and if I press F2 takes me to BIOS. It appears it won't try to boot from anything else.
I don't think I can boot from my internal CD-ROM drive anyway because the piece of crap hasn't worked for a long time. It stopped burning CD's completely right after my warranty was up. It now only rarely will read a CD, but seems to read DVD's ok. I formatted my thumb drive to be bootable with DOS but I can't seem to get it to boot to that. On the Dell PC I'm on now I can press F-12 when the PC starts up to select what to boot from and I can select to boot from the CD or USB. On my laptop I only see the boot order which I've set correctly but doesn't seem to make a difference.
I do have an external CD-ROM drive I could use, but haven't tried it as it's not with me at the moment. I don't think it would make a difference anyway. It doesn't look like it's detecting any USB devices. Anyway, there is so much not working on this laptop I'm better off getting a new more reliable laptop instead of spending tons to repair this $3K junk. But I really need to get files off my dead hard drive..does anyone have any more suggestions or know where I can take it or if I have to some place I can ship it to where they can get my files for me?
