PCA Forums

I have a guy that brought me his Sony desktop PC to fix. He said a few days ago that the hard drive began making noise and now it won't boot. I thought it could be fixed with SpinRite, but it has so many errors that I just gave up. I went to Sony's site, and in one of their FAQ's, they stated that the install files are located under the Windows folder in a folder called "I386". I was able to locate the files when I used the drive as an external USB device, and I was able to copy the entire folder content to a CD, but the CD will not boot because it does not have an autorun or setup.exe plus some other misc files. I used another XP Home Retail CD to compare the contents.

Is there any way to make this a bootable CD if I copy the missing files? The guy did not make a recovery CD.

Just use any OEM CD and his COA that should be on the side of the machine...reload. Then go to Sony's site and get the drivers. I would say that the HD will need replaced.

Yeah I did that already by going to Sony's site and getting the drivers, but it would be much easier to have the Sony drivers that come with XP while it's installing. Is it possible to see the hidden partition? When I connect the drive up via USB, it only sees 2 drives. One that has the OS and the other is for data.

Ex: probably the only way to see that image is to use sonys utility to recover probably like F10 when you boot

Sony USUALLY uses a bizarre system where you need the Recovery CD(s) that came with the computer, and then the drivers are stored in the recovery partition. Unlike most companies which just put an entire image of the factory install on the recovery partition.

As previously mentioned you can use an OEM XP installer (that handy 9-in-1 XP installer CD floating around torrents is the perfect thing for this) and then enter the CD key on the sticker on the side of his computer. But yeah, then you have to individually download all the drivers from Sony's site, and it's not always easy to know which drivers you need because some models come with different NICs, vid cards and modems.

I was able to get the drivers from their site. I just need to get an OEM copy of XP Home. I can't wait until we move away from mechanical hard drives.