0

I am working on a Sony Vaio Laptop, Model VPPCCA2FXX. Upon boot-up the error message, "Your HDD is in danger of immanent failure. Replace your HDD" appears. Press F2 to continue...the machine then continues to boot into Windows 7 although painfully slow. I backed up all of the data...tried to make a recovery disk as none were provided with the unit purchased 2 years ago. The Sony VAIO Care program installed does not seem to work...many error messages appear.

I installed a new HDD which is compatible with this laptop. When booting from the Optical drive, the installation would not take effect. Next, I rebooted to the windows media and at the first installer screen, I entered into the Command prompt screens. I then typed the following: DISKPART, LIST DISK, SELECT DISK 0, CLEAN, CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY, FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL="WINDOWS 7". At this point I received a message saying "no disk volume" something to that effect.

It appears to me that I may need a driver in order to make the new HDD compatible for this Sony Mother board. I went to the Sony site and have had little luck with finding drivers etc.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

William Cloonan
  • 1

1 Answers1

0

You don't need a drive for the new harddisk.

But you probably need a driver for the SATA controller on the motherboard. You can load this during the setup of Win7 from a USB key.

Windows 7 will recognize most older SATA controllers on its own (although not always with the best drivers, but at least well enough to get Windows installed).
But for hardware younger than 3-4 years you will usually need a SATA AHCI driver for the SATA controller.

You can set the SATA controller in IDE (or sometimes called "legacy") mode in the BIOS and usually Win7 can use that without needing extra drivers, but this has slightly less performance AND is the wrong thing to do for an SSD (Trim can't work in IDE mode!).

Please note: Some BIOS allow changing the controller between 3 modes: IDE, AHCI and AHCI-RAID. With a single disk AHCI makes most sense. AHCI-RAID is only for the experimenters out there who want to mess with fake-RAID.
Note that in most cases AHCI and AHCI-RAID mode require different drivers.

Tonny
  • 31,463