Bear with me as I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to these things and I truly appreciate any help that can be offered.

The issue is with my sister's laptop and I've been unable to get anywhere with it. First, it is a Sony VAIO that was purchased new from Best Buy and is just under a year and a half old but as far as I've been told, the warranty was one year. She is pretty much incapable of having done anything to it as far as screwing with any configuration. She's a college student and uses it for word, internet and email and thats about it.

She turned it on and windows would not load, the screen came up as a windows error and gave her the two choices of start windows normally or repair. Either choice leads to a black screen, sometimes with a movable mouse cursor, sometimes just black. Any amount of time waited has not resulted in anything further. This is still how it is when turned on now.

We can access F2 and we can hit F8. We seem to be able to do anything we would need to when we hit F2 but thats not much help. However if we choose ANY of the choices from F8, we then go to a black screen, and again no amount of waiting gets us further so using any of the safe mode options, command prompt, last working configuration, none of them are really even accessible.

Through my own research we found out about creating an ISO disk for Vista recovery and tried to boot from the disk as the computer did not come with and actual disk. The prompt to press a key to boot from disk comes up, and then is followed by "windows is loading files" and a status bar. After that completes, the microsoft corporation and the colored meter at the bottom pops up but no vista logo above it. Then it goes to a black screen again and the mouse cursor comes up a minute or 2 later. This has happened about 95% of the time and stayed there. On 3 occasions, the screen then turned to the blue background that would be the beginning of the install screen. 2 of the times it just stayed blue and did not go any further. One time the screen LOADED with the options of install or repair. We chose repair and then chose the language options and then the box popped up asking to select the operating system to repair, and the cursor turned to an hourglass. These SCREENS came up over the course of a half hour, not minutes. However, after leaving that final screen up for 2 hours, the hourglass never disappeared and the operating system did not pop up and we gave up. Only that one time did it get that far.

So basically, thats where we stand. I'm not sure if this is a lost cause at this point because we really can't do anything as far as I can tell. The latest thing we tried was a full vista disk to see if the repair would work from that but we were unable to even get where we got that one time with the burned ISO disk. I don't even see how we could accomplish a fresh install if we wanted to.

If anyone can offer any advice whatsoever, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
RonIt seems to me that the Vista OS needs to be reloaded. Since you have not provided the model of Vaio I can not research if it may have a restore command to reload the operating system with a command at boot up. I did look up that some Vaio's can restore with holding alt + F10 at boot and it will start the factory restore process. If you do this it will completely wipe the hard drive of all personal files, pictures, documents and such and programs loaded after it was purchased will be gone.

If you have not backed up these personal files and need them you may want to seek help by posting that info here and asking for ways to get it accomplished.

You will need to do all windows updates once this restore process is finished and I suggest you get Antivirus and Malware protection ASAP. We do have suggestions for free Antivirus and Malware programs if needed.

Please feel free to ask any questions about this before making a decision.Thanks for the response. The model number is PCG7153L. The computer had Norton 360 installed and up to date.

That restore command feature is something that we will certainly have to consider if its available for this model. Ideally of course we'd like to be able to salvage the personal stuff that was there which was mainly photos and school related papers, etc. as it was not backed up. However depending upon the degree of difficulty of what options there are to accomplish that, we may opt to forgo that. We would of course like to know what possibilities exist there if you or anyone else can provide them.

The main thing we wanted to know is if the computer was a complete lost cause or if it could be salvaged either with or without saving what was on it. If that restore command will work, then thats the first answer. It seems to me you have no option at this time to boot into windows and save the personal files so you will need to access the hard drive with a boot cd or remove the hard drive and install it in a external drive case and the recover files from a working computer by copying them.

Laptops need a 2.5 inch either SATA or IDE compatible external drive case depending what your system uses.

The option to boot and save files http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I suggest you get files recovered and then try the restore command and if it does not work then you will need to order restore disks from Sony.

*TIP* Always be ready for a computer crash by backing up personal files to another hard drive internal/external or online storage. Some infections and corrupt windows issues can cause complete crashes and recovering the files then costs you un-needed time you could spend installing windows as new.

You can always wait for others suggestions before making a decision.I just had this problem recently. So unfortunately it sounds like the hard drive is dead, and you need a new one. Though there are a couple of things you can do to check this. Under the f8 options there is a "don't automatically restart upon failure" there you can actually see which blue screen error you are getting. Another thing you can do is check if you can actually read the hard drive by taking it out and connecting it to another computer.