the laptop is a Sony vaio and does not original hdd had, had windows 2000 on it gave me some error that says system 32 error kernel something like that. I found the files put them on a floppy and another message appeared then when I rest the laptop a massage came up saying no operating system found. I then got a windows xp cd, my cd rom drive does not work but I have an IDE to USB cable I used the boot disk that need 6 floppies I downloaded it from microsoft web site. it detected the cd rom drive that was hooked up to the USB to IDE cable but when I tried to partition the hdd it would not let me? I also looked under the system bios and when I looks at the boot order the hdd name was a bunch of symbols.
I was able to connect my Maxtor hdd with windows xp in it to my laptop using the IDE to USB able and when I used the boot disk that is 6 floppies I pressed R for system recovery and it did detect my Maxtor hdd and was bale to view it in dos but I don’t now how to use the system recovery