[Yokomo]

ok here is the deal I bought a sony viao PCG-SRX77P and the guy formatted the hard drive and now I cannot get an OS in to it I pulled out the hard drive and installed XP on to it in a compaq EVO and pulled it out and the sony will not see the boot up.. says non system disk so I pulled it back out and put it in the EVO and it works perfectly? WHAT THE? so I installed free dos and that worked fine and I tryed booting to a win98 disk in the compaq and coping the win xp disk to the harddrive and it wont let me... not to mention that the lappy has not one single drive in it.. and so far I cann't get it to work with a PCMCIA cd rom or firewire? and help at all would be great or if some one has this laptop and I could send you my harddrive and you could do a restore that would be awsome...

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XP must be installed on the machine it's going to be used on. You can't install it on to a disk in one PC then put that disk in another PC --- as you found out -- it won't work, and that's normal behaviour for XP. When you say the guy formatted it and it won't accept an XP install, I assume you are booting off the xp cd to install it? It won't install from DOS like earlier versions of Windows. You must boot from it to start setup.

[pip22]

XP must be installed on the machine it's going to be used on. You can't install it on to a disk in one PC then put that disk in another PC --- as you found out -- it won't work, and that's normal behaviour for XP. When you say the guy formatted it and it won't accept an XP install, I assume you are booting off the xp cd to install it? It won't install from DOS like earlier versions of Windows. You must boot from it to start setup.

[Yokomo]

so in other word there is no way to do this short of paying sony $450 to reinstall XP? that is the cheapest quote that I have got from them..oh yea and pay shipping both ways.. man sony really sux!!!

[Samm]

When you placed the drive in the compaq & installed XP, was the drive set up as the primary master (ie first drive) in the system?

If it was slaved instead or on the secondary controller, XP will install to that drive & work fine it that machine but will not work in the original system due to missing boot files

[azreal]

hello guys,

just recently had this same problem. you need to make the recovery disks which you can find in control panel (new sony viao models) or use the recovery disk came with tour system when you bought it. because for some reason the recovery cds registers the serial number of the hdd that makes the system to boot to windows.

hopefully it helps,
don