Hello, I'm repairing a laptop for a family member. A Sony Vaio SVE1512M1E running windows 8.1. The laptop appeared to be switching between Metro and desktop continuously. Got it into safe mode (eventually) where it was very stable. Got the data off it. I attempted a system repair and got the message "required drive partition missing". Same for system restore. Checked drive for errors. Some were reported so I'm now running chkdsk and it's been stuck on 10% for the last hour (750Gb drive). I'm thinking the drive needs replacing. What do you think?
Definitely sounds like a borked hard drive... Can you take the drive out and connect it to a working pc to try something like crystaldiskinfo to get to the SMART info? Unfortunately if Sony didn't provide an OS disc and instead made a recovery partition on the borked hdd (and they probably did) you'll need to reinstall after having downloaded the OS disc (well ISO) - there are legal options for this btw (info here)
To busy watching the Ryder Cup today to try that George. Tomorrows job. I'll hook it up to my desktop and run crystal disk info and post the results. Thanks for the info regarding windows 8.
http://imgur.com/0QDFX3E Here's a screen shot of crystal scan. With the drive hooked up to my system, I checked the drive with chkdsc. It reported errors. I ran the repair and now chkdsk has reported having repaired the drive.
