Home PC Tech Support Person in Guildford Area?

[limpsfield]

I have started using an old laptop PC that has been unused for a couple of years. All was going fine until last night when I got the blue screen of death and the thing crashed.

When I try to start it I get the message "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"

I am stumped now. I don't have the recovery disk for this (Sony Vaio) but can buy them from Sony.

IS there a good PCrepair person near me someone can recommend who can either get this thing to start or extract the data from the hardrive, and not charge a fortune?

thanks in advance

[JimByrne]

Hi Dude,

Might not need Sony recovery discs... i dont suppose you have a plain windows XP CD lying around do you? Doesn't necessarily have to be the once for that particular laptop either, any normal XP CD should do the job as your windows license is the sticker on the laptop which is still all present and correct. (It will need to be the same version of XP as you currently have though, i.e. Home or Proffessional otherwise your license won't cover it)

If you do have or can get a CD, i can probably talk you through doing an in-place repair of your windows installation. which may sort you out.

This is assuming that the hard drive hasn't bitten the big one of course... if it's hardware then that's a whole different can-o-worms.

Jim.
Pro Geek

[fade2grey]

have you left a CD\memory card in when rebooting? - alternatively look in the bios (del or f1 or f11 at POST) & make sure the hard disk is still detected correctly.

[stevieb]

I have a old Sony Vaio in the garage, and can lend you a copy of the recovery dics, the laptop i have is a Sony Vaio FR315B

STeve