Sony viao not booting up

[mishkin513]

Hi everyone, and I want to say I am happy to be here. Here is the problem I am facing. I have Sony VIAO laptop about 1.5 years old. My son was downloading and installing some video game for his psp. The game is leagal and so on. After that, about Sunday, I was trying to turn on the laptop and it wont boot. Basicaly, the logo screen goes of, than the Windows Vista running bar comes up and stays like that forever. I tried to press F10 on the boot to go to recovery center as i did earlier on my other computer, but that thing is not even loading. If I go to F8, I am getting the boot menue, saying that recent change of my hardware or software dowsn't let me boot the windows and it asks me for Vista CD, which I never got with the laptop because SONY doesn't provide cds any longer. They partition the drive and put all recovery files there, however, I can't even get to that screen. I was thinking that it might be RAM or HD failure. please help. Any help and suggestions are appreciated.

[Xlphos]

Hello,

You should try a Linux live CD to see if the hard drive is OK, you can also do a memtest (RAM test) from most live CDs.

You maybe able to get Sony to send some new restore CD/DVDs but you may have to pay for them.

Do you know anyone who has installation CD/DVDs that are the same operating system version you are using; you could use these to repair the installation.

I don't think it is a RAM problem, more likely a HDD problem.

- Let us know how it goes.

[mishkin513]

thanks for ur reply, i also think its a HD and to be more exact, I think it might be a boot virus. In that case I would need to get it off somehow.