I crashed my computer hardcore, and tried to reformat it. I have a Sony Vaio and I inserted the Windows XP System recovery CD and got to the part where it began restoring drive C but then a window popped up saying "Disc Access:Sense Operation Failed". When I press OK it says "The Recovery process is incomplete. Your system may not operate properly" and then it restarts. I tried erasing drive C and D by repartitioning them, but now everything seems to be erased. I have a boot disk, and I tried using that but I don't really know how to work it. If anyone can help I'd really appreaciate it. Thanks.

A Sense error indicates a failed disk access (read/write) operation. Some common causes for such errors are a faulty hard drive, damaged or loose cabling, the use of a 40-wire IDE cable on newer ULTRA ATA drives which require the use of an 80-wire cable, and possibly incorrect drive settings in the BIOS.

However, out of 74 hits in the following Google search for the exact error you received, 28 of those related specifically to Sony Vaios and the use of the system/recovery disks that shipped with the computers. Apparently Sony hasn't admitted to any error on their part, but they may either have had bad batches of drives in certain production runs of the Vaio, or problems with some of the recovery CDs they shipped with the units (at least one user reported that his system shipped with recovery disks made for a different version of Vaio than the one he purchased):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Disc+Access%3ASense+Operation+Failed&btnG=Search

The drive may truly be failing, but the comparatively high number of reports related specifically to Vaios makes me more than a bit suspicious...

I had this same error message with a Sony VAIO desktop machine. I was able to install XP with a regular OEM disk and I used a program to test the hard drive and it was fine. Then I used a free bootup floppy from http://www.killdisk.com/ to completely wipe the drive. After I did this, the Sony restore disks worked again. =)

appearently,the problem is the disk needs a low level format..beyond what fdisk would do...i am in the process of running a program called killdisk which should fix the boot sector problem and allow system restore from vio to run..i'll get back to you to let you know if this works

..i'll get back to you to let you know if this works

Hi yerpc,

First of all- welcome to DaniWeb!

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Thanks for understanding.

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