My 11 month old TR3A crashed last night and is now displaying the dreadfull “a disk error occured” message upon every startup :cry:

A look into bios still shows the 40gig hitachi drive as present…

I’m assuming i’ve either got bad windows sectors or the thing is smoked.

Sony US can’t do anything for me since i am currently residing abroad (france).

someone recommended i perform a hd scan with ultimatebootcd.com to check my HD status.

The most important thing for me is to extract some vital data. Is there any disk repair utility that could work as a bootable cd?

If not, is there a way to connect the HD to an external storage device to transfer data? a computer store specialist can do it here but ONLY with 2.5” and 3.5” HDs so it seems im screwed!

Eventually when my data is saved, i will then need to get the TR back up and running. Can anyone tell me what the most reliable HD model is best suited for the TR (i heard toshiba) ? will the installation be user doable?

i’m so gutted that this top of the line investment broke down on me after less than a year of average use :x ...id really appreciate any help asap !!

ok when i turned on the vaio this morning, it didnt give me the error message and went straight to “sony system recovery by windows” at which point it crashed while trying to attempt so.

I am curious though, does this system recovery basically reformats your computer to the day 1 settings or will it repair windows into its last state? I’d like to know because in the first case, i will attempt to extract my data before using this recovery method.

btw, I performed a hd scan with ultimate boot cd, and it let me know some bad sectors were found and could be repaired…

[quote author=“isreal”]ok when i turned on the vaio this morning, it didnt give me the error message and went straight to “sony system recovery by windows” at which point it crashed while trying to attempt so.

I am curious though, does this system recovery basically reformats your computer to the day 1 settings or will it repair windows into its last state? I’d like to know because in the first case, i will attempt to extract my data before using this recovery method.

btw, I performed a hd scan with ultimate boot cd, and it let me know some bad sectors were found and could be repaired…

Recover it first then proceed to recover.  Anyways you don’t have a choice but to bring your system back on.
Yes, It will reformat your hard disk to “Day 1 settings” 
I hope you did a 2nd partition to where you put your files..
If not you have to find a program that lets you
recover files in your hard disk.

sorry to hear of your troubles but if u search on my id u will find my hard drive crash adventure on Everest. There is no way to recover the drive that i could find that would not cost more then the worth of the laptop, and with no garentee of sucess.

the best thing to do with these cheesy drives is to always have a partition-based backup (like acronis) so u can just pop a new drive in, restore and go.

ps. anyone know if there is a 60 or 80 gig drive that fits into the TR case?
jigs