Hard drive no longer recognized by computer

Ok i was in the process of switch my mothers 80G seagate barracuda hard
drive with a 160G seagate barracuda hard drive when both decided not to
work with her comp. When i turn it on it says i need to insert boot
device, unfortunatly i have no such disk or CD. My other comp doesn't
have a floppy drive so i can't make a boot disk with that and the comp
that doesn't work probably doesn't boot from the CD drive. To top it
all off i have neather a floppy disk or writable CD to work with and no
store in town has them in stock. the Comp is a Sony Viao PCV-RZ32G. Can
anyone help?


--
Ginzored
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ginzored's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/members/115690.htm
View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/xp-hardware/1215912.htm

http://forums.techarena.in

Ginzored wrote:
> Ok i was in the process of switch my mothers 80G seagate barracuda hard
> drive with a 160G seagate barracuda hard drive when both decided not to
> work with her comp. When i turn it on it says i need to insert boot
> device, unfortunatly i have no such disk or CD. My other comp doesn't
> have a floppy drive so i can't make a boot disk with that and the comp
> that doesn't work probably doesn't boot from the CD drive. To top it
> all off i have neather a floppy disk or writable CD to work with and no
> store in town has them in stock. the Comp is a Sony Viao PCV-RZ32G. Can
> anyone help?
>

Things to check:

1) Jumpers on each hard drive. If the drives are on the same ribbon cable,
one drive is Master, the other one Slave. Or both drives set to Cable
Select. If a *single* drive is on a ribbon cable, use the end connector
on the cable, not the middle one.

2) All cables inserted properly, including power to each drive.

3) Verify the boot order in the BIOS Setup screen.
Enter the BIOS and verify that the 80GB drive is being
selected as the boot drive. There should be a menu, which
selects the order of storage devices to boot from.

4) You can use the BIOS screen to verify the hardware connectivity.
The BIOS screen should be listing the 80GB and 160GB drives by part number.
The BIOS screen can be used to verify the drive is detected.

You could try putting everything back, the way it was originally, and
see if that works.

Any time you work on a computer, you need a "backup plan". In other
words, "what will I do, if I break this computer?".

There are various rescue CDs you can prepare, and I use my Knoppix
CD, any time a computer does not have a working OS on it. But that
still requires a working CD drive. I don't think I would let a
computer sit, with a broken CD drive for very long, because that
is an essential ingredient for computer maintenance. If a computer
is completely isolated from the outside world, that makes it a bit
harder to fix.

In any case, the tool of choice at this point, is the BIOS Setup screens.
They'll tell you how much trouble you're in. Check for drive detection
first, then examine the boot order setting.

I tried the documents here, but they don't even tell you which key
to press, to enter the BIOS screen ! Try pressing the F2 function key,
when you first power on the computer.

http://esupport.sony.com/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=PCVRZ32G&LOC=3

Paul