I have a vaio laptop from a customer, who says it was needing a reformat. He took it to a geek on the local college campus. The computer nerd said it would be a simple process, and he formatted the complete hard drive during an installation of xp. After the format concluded, the installation process continued until the computer does the first restart. As soon as this happened, the laptop now just goes from the very first post screen that says vaio, then the blinking cursor which takes a second then reads 'no operating system found'. I inserted a winxp cd of my own, and it spins like its about to start loading, but then just stops reading after about 5 seconds or so. After that its just the blinking cursor, and nothing else happens. My question is is there possibly some files needed on the hard drive that were possibly deleted after formatting the entire hdd? My customer was told that this particular model has certain files to make the cdrom and other parts of the laptop work. In the bios it appears as if everything is being seen ok, so I dont know. Gonna check the hard drive right now and see that it was formatted correctly.

See if you can get the operating system installed using an external USB CDROM. Vaio's are known for internal CD problems

tmagic, won't agree with you about vaio internal CD's problems. in this case, i'd like to advice to check the HDD for errors, and to some tests of RAM CPU, etc

Yes lamo,
after a second look I would say the the hard drive is bad

Update: Seems that this particular vaio has particular software integrated with the hard drive, and once erased needs the recovery partition to reinstall the necessary files to even install windows again. And the hard drive is not bad, I've tried 2 other good test hard drives that I have specifically for testing purposes. On all of them I'm getting the same results. I tried running off of an external cd rom as well, no dice.

And so, onto another solution if anyone can suggest one. I need to get the recovery software, but I have contacted sony and the software for this particular laptop no longer exists for distribution. They can however have me send the friggin thing, and have them copy the image of the needed recovery partition onto the hard drive and they would then install winxp. There has to be some way around this expensive option, and leads to a question. If they have the image file, why cant they simply burn a disc for the customer to have? Seems to me if the laptop crashes again I'd be right back in the same boat having to send the laptop to them each time. As the owner of this machine, I would think they would be more helpful.