Sony VAIO help needed

[juliant]

Apologies if this isnt the right forum.

I have a Sony VIAO laptop with no recovery disk or XP disk. When it boots it just gets to the MS Windows XP blue screen and just hangs. Safe mode isnt an option as it does the same thing. I think I may be looking at a reinstall but did notice(when it was working) that it had a partitioned D drive.

Any advice and if I did reinstall would it just be a case of partiotioning the C drive?

Thanks again

Julian

[Darthtanion]

On many pre-made computers, manufacturers have added a smaller D:\ drive that has an image of the system install. I won't go into my feelings about this type of cheap garbage setups, but you should be able to access the D:\ drive and reinstall that image to the C:\ drive as a fresh install. Don't make any changes to the D:\ drive, though, as the folks at Sony obviously didn't feel you had need of a OS disk to begin with.

[sampaske]

i'm having a slightly related issue. I have a sony laptop and it does indeed have a partioned d drive. I am trying to install a win 95 (though xp home compatible game) though i am getting an error message saying that the windows/sstem32/autoexec.nt file is not compatibale with ms dos or win apps. checking the ms support website it suggests expanding the relevant files in dos from the start up disc. like juliant I dont have a recovery/xp disc - will i be able to expand the files from teh d drive?


thanks in advance

[Darthtanion]

I don't deal in manufactured machines so I'm not really familiar with the format of the files stored on the small backup drive. However, one trick that I have found that sometimes works on older games like that is to copy the disk contents from the source to your local hard drive. Copy protection wasn't generally an issue on these older programs so you can often do a direct copy/paste to your own drive. From there you'll want to right click the executable installation file and go to the "Compatibility" tab. Using the drop-down menu choose compatibility with Win95. WinXP uses its emulation mode to fake out the installation program to make it think it is loading on a Win95 system. Once the game loads you can try to use it and see if you need to repeat the trick with the program's main executable file. This trick doesn't always work, but I have had some degree of success with it on my daughter's machine.