while trying to reload my 2 year old sony laptop with the system restore disks that came with it.. it got to 65% and said "critical error" and stopped.. five different times. I went to Frys Electronics and talked to a service person who said that sometimes those disks are faulty. Does anyone know how to go about trading the faulty disk for one that does work? My email letters to sony are either not answered or its a canned answer that doesn't address my question. The young man at the service dept at the store said I should be able to reload my formatted hard drive with those "system restore " disks. But he was a VERY young looking fellow.... so I dunno... sometimes there hasn't been enough experience in the field to REALLY know.. is there anyone out there with a sony laptop and windows ME who DOES know? I thank you amijo@juno.com

hello with m.e bootdisk in drive reboot at the a:scandisk click enter check for errors a large cluster of errors could stop a reinstall allso take some window cleaner and clean the recovery cd,s. try these things and post back.

thank you wawadave..my hard drive is already reformatted..when I turn on the laptop it comes up with A: because its starting with a start up disk I made before I got into this mess. The CD drive is F... I type F:\ and it eventually does change to F and it runs the CD drive and makes whirl sounds...then stops. Can I type scandisk at the A:\ prompt and get it to do something? I don't know any dos commands at all and guess I am working with dos.. a REAL novice thanks you JOAnn

http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/ Thats as far as i got at sony's support page until you tell us what model number you have.

After getting your laptop to boot to an A:\ prompt you are correct in typeing in the letter of the CD-ROM drive and getting to that point but at the F:\ prompt you might need to enter a run command such as that done with other OpSys disks. For most installs that I have performed it is something like this: "(your drive #):\SETUP.exe" but on rare occasion I have had to add the drive that I want setup to address such as "C:". Hope this helps you out JoAnn 8}."We Phoenixians need to stick together and not just because of the warm weather!"

Thank you people, for your posts. My sony laptop is PCG Fx 120 and on the laptop itself it says "model PCG 955A". I went to the sony site and didn't see that last... yes, we phoenix people need to stick together!! Computer people everywhere need to help each other out..as they are very devious machines, sometimes. I will try cleaning the CD disk with window cleaner.. thank you JOAnn

Thank you, peoples, for your posts. My laptop is a sony PCG FX 120.. and on the laptop itself it says Model PCG 955A. I didn't see that last when I visited the sony site... Yes, we Phoenix people need to stick together! I will try cleaning that restore disk with window cleaner and see if it makes a difference... thank you JoAnn