My main HDD in this developed some bad sectors which prevented me from booting into Vista (although I did manage to access data files and copy some over to the 2nd drive on the laptop using Parted Magic).
Anyway, decided to replace the 160Gb Hitachi SATA drive with a larger model of the same make (250Gb).
I pulled out the recovery discs I'd made when I first got the PC and tried doing a clean install of Vista onto the new drive. However, I'm now stuck during the install as it wants me to load drivers for the SATA controller.
I downloaded the original zipped set from Sony's website for the AR51M. Copied the SATA driver folder to another PC and burned it onto a DVD.
Then I followed these steps:
Reboot with the Recovery CD.
System Recovery Options/Select Operating System, etc.
Swap CD over for the DVD with the SATA driver folder
Load drivers
Select the .inf files on the DVD
Then I select each and every individual driver within those .inf files.. but it says loading drivers for most of them and then still doesn't show Vista as an operating system I can install. 2 of the drivers gave me an 'installation failed' msg. So I'm stuck.
I wanted to split this drive into 2 partitions and load Vista onto the 1st and Kubuntu onto the other half. But I'm getting nowhere fast as even Kubuntu sees the drive but wants to install Kubuntu onto the whole 250Gb.
Help please...
