It is one of those rather smaller notebooks but not the smallest ones that have size of a paperback book, It is one like here.
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Sony-Vaio-Z-2012.htm
Problems started with some infection that I was asked by the owner to look into. I found weird thing, the desktop didn't respond to mouse in whatever way - clicking on icons did nothing, right clicking on desktop didn't open menu, but if I opened Desktop in explorer window, it all worked OK.
To start doing something, I unistalled some toolbar, then went on a second one and that one asked for reboot to finish unistall. After reboot I got to logon screen and it was password protected which I though I remembered but didn't. Anyway instead of going to ask, I recalled I have this little bootable usb key with RWP (remove windows password) and I figured this is opportunity to use it first time.
I rebooted and it went past usb key to windows, I did't want to wait for windows to boot and shot them down by holding power key. I think I did that twice, then went to google for how boot this notebook off usb. Found it should be F11 and the usb key booted and I got into the program to remove password.
Here I ran into problem because I was asked to locate SAM file... and it opened into Win32 folder. I couldn't find anything sam (not sure its extension or sam.exe or ini or what. There was nothing sam in there. I googled and found out that in win32 location should be folder Config which wasn't there, only Drivers folder. Upon further reading it looked like this config folder is not accessible or what, but I thought if I booted into winPE I should see everything... but no sam file anywhere. So I pulled the key out and forcefully rebooted but here serious troubles started.
Actually booting into the pass reseting again, I still get the same win32 view and the reason there's no sam file is that it opens onto winPE... I guess that when I first booted into it, the disks were already gone, else it would have found the sam file automatically, at least I suppose it would.
When booting now, I see the first screen with a logo in lower right and then up pops a screen with RAID info where if I pressed ctrl-I I would go into raid configuration itself and the two disks 119GB arelabeled in red as Incompatible.
When I press ctrl-I I get into raid setup screen and I don't have any raid configured and couldnt configure it even if I wanted, because the two disks are demed incompatible (to make raid off them I presume) even though they are both the same size 128 GB. I do hope the raid wasn't configured on the laptop as bought, and I am sure nobody was raiding the disks after the purchase.
If I let the previous screen rest for a bit (without pressing ctrl-I) it times out and presumably attempts to boot off the built in disk but I get a message No Operating System Found.
At this point I made win7 PE bootable usb key and hold F11 and I boot into it but once there I don't see any internal disks (should be two there) in win explorer. The winpe has some startup repair program which I have run and it did something and told me to reboot and see if it worked and that it might continue doing something if it doesn't.... it didn't boot and it didn't do anything further.
Now I should mention another funny thing. I know how to make usb key bootable to install win7 off it including first booting into winPE and starting installer from there. When I do start it, it gets to the screen where you select the disk to install onto but no disks are visible. The funny thing is that if I get out of this winPE and reboot and try to boot into this winPE again, the usb key is non bootable and I have to redo it all over again. And then I can boot into winPE from it but next time the boot sector is reported as damaged and it says
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc0000098
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file does not contain a valid os entry.
This means the boot confguration on the usb key got damaged. As I said, I can make fresh bootable key, copy winPE on it and boot off it OK but next reboot it won't boot up again and has to be redone. I have already did that twice over. Is there possibility that I have some virus in memory or somewhere, which destroys this boot config file? Is that realistically possible?
I simply can't believe the booting key going haywire like this. But the Window Reset Password usb key boots everytime. I have thought of the possibility that it was this key that is 'virus' and destroyed the booting file of the built in disks but I doubt it, anyway I got it off site where in past I got tons and tons of portable programs plus bootables of various kinds and never had any problem whatever. I am inclined to think that program for pass removal is ok, and that I either hosed os booting file by shutting down forcefully during win bootup, or that the laptop has some insidious virus.
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