Come to find out, the primary boot option was the harddrive, which, frankly, is the worst boot option to be set as the primary boot method since there’s no way to bypass the hard disk boot without modifying the BIOS. When I rebooted with the installation disk, the disk didn’t boot. Fortunately, I had some Vista installation disks that could be used to reinstall the OS with the Windows serial key found on the bottom of the laptop. This meant that his system was essentially worthless at this point. I did this, but it seems that even the recovery partition was hosed. From here, follow the instructions to accomplish what you want. Use the arrow keys to highlight the “Repair Your Computer” option and press Enter.
The Advanced Boot Options screen will appear shortly. If you want to recover the system back to factory defaults, reboot the system, wait for the VAIO logo to appear, and then start pressing F8. Interestingly, this was put into the F8 Advanced Boot Options screen that is built into Windows. Since the system doesn’t ship with disks for recovering the Windows installation, I figured that there had to be a hotkey combination that brought up the appropriate menu. The model is VGN-NS330J, but the information I found seems to apply to all Sony VAIO laptops.Īnyways, this machine was seriously messed up, and he just bought it. Earlier tonight I had to work on a friend’s new Sony VAIO system.
