[Paulie Tandoori]

I've got a sony vaio vaio fe51v running Vista. It crashed suddenly yesterday, an error message popped up about a fatal error with the side bar, as well as another to do with Skype - not sure why the latter as i've never used Skype.

Anyways, long and the short of it is, i can't get the thing booted up again. There's a repair tools option that comes up when i start it up but that is failing because it says there is no recovery disk. We don't have a recovery disk because when i bought this, the bloke in the shop told us that the laptop had a partition on the hard drive which meant that you would always be able to, at the very least, reset and reboot the thing from scratch.

Now, i've read through the recovery manual and that informs me that we should have made a recovery disk immediately after using the laptop for the first time. The manual also details ways to reboot if you haven't made a recovery disk but none of these appear to work.

I'm not too bothered about losing what's on the damn thing (photo's mainly and i've got most of them backed-up), if only i could find some way to get it working again. But it seems stuck in this endless loop of switch on, welcome Vaio screen is displayed, hit f8 and then get choice of either 'repair tools (recommended)' or 'start windows normally', both of which don't work. I did get a menu once yesterday that allowed a start in safe mode but can't get that menu up anymore (it also came when i pressed f8)

Any ideas people? Cos i'm flummoxed.

[pjhutch]

Take it back to the shop and get them to fix it.

[Paulie Tandoori]

i was hoping to avoid that but it's looking like its the only option.

cheers.

[DaveA]

Go to "Start, Help and Support, Manuals and Specifications, and then Vaio Recover Guide"