Hi all,

I was recently given one of these laptops and told 'if you can fix it, you can keep it'. Happy days!

Anyway. The BIOS reports that there's no hard drive attached, the drive itself makes some odd noises during the boot process, and then the computer eventually reports that it can't find an operating system. All well and good so far - I think it's fair to say that I need a new hard drive.

However, POST takes ages and ages. I've used a CD based Linux distribution to check that everything else is OK (networking, screen etc all seem fine) and the computer hangs at the Vaio splash screen for about five minutes before starting to boot from the CD (even with every other boot device disabled). I'm hoping that this has something to do with the hard drive as well, but I can't be sure because I don't know how to get rid of the splash screen to see the usual boot messages. It also hangs for the same amount of time before going into the BIOS if I press F2 when the splash screen appears.

I'd like to think that this would stop if I installed a new hard drive, but I'm just wondering if there could be any other reason for the huge delays. It would be a very annoying thing to have to live with day to day.

Oh, and I've also done four passes of Memtest - no errors.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Looks good to me, I'd say the bios is just hanging on the checksum due to the failing hdd. I've had it happen with desktops.

and hey it's a freebie if it does still hang up you can always flick it off as a not so speedy going machine!

BTW: I've had similar due to bad earthing on the mobo,but im not sure how that would relate to laptop!