Alfred_63 said:
Alright, I'll follow your suggestions. To run chkdsk/r do I go to
Start - Run and type chkdsk?
Thanks Vanguard
To follow up on your questions:
1. Your right, from Bootable disk provided by WD for install and
diagnostics. It has a diagnostic tool and an option is to check the
drive. That is where the 220 error is derived.
2. No, I have a seperate WD1200 for Systems and it is all on C. The
drive in question is the storage or slave drive.
3. I have not run chkdsk/r
4. It is a recent problem. The drive has been operating smoothly for
about a year.
5. Drive format, I don't recall, whatever WD recommended during
install.
6. BIOS, can't find anything related to drive security.
ATA-5 provides password locking of a drive. You might have to call Sony
tech support to find out from them how to unlock it. The idea is that
if the hard drive gets removed from a stolen laptop that it remain
unusable to the thief. It's a combo of BIOS support and password on the
drive (probably in the MBR or elsewhere on track 0).
When I went to their support page (
http://www.iq.sony.com/). By
searching on "PCVRX490TV", there was a link to
http://snipurl.com/89kp.
The other articles also mention Micro Vault but it seems to apply to
removable drives (and removing the password wipes the disk), but see if
there is a password utility installed for the Vaio. Looks like you
might have to call Sony to figure out how to reset the password (rather
than remove it which will remove your data, too). As when installing
another instance of Windows but you had used EFS under the old instance,
you need to have something of the security certificate, key, or password
used under that prior instance of Windows to unlock the other drives.
For EFS, you need to have exported the EFS certificate used to encrypt
the files so you could import it later. This eliminates someone from
stealing a computer, especially a laptop, and installing a fresh copy of
Windows or moving the drive to another Windows host and getting at the
data.
Your reinstall of Windows wiped out the password it had to allow it to
access the other drive. On some laptops, like IBM's Thinkpads, changing
the BIOS supervisor password can also render the password-protected hard
drives unusable until you also reset the password on them. The password
is encoded into the particular BIOS EEPROM(s) on a motherboard and used
against the hard drive(s) used with it, so if you replace the
motherboard or carry the hard drive to a different computer then you
cannot read that drive because the password stored on the hard drive
won't mate with the key, if any, in the other motherboard's BIOS. See
http://snipurl.com/AMI_pwdlock for an example of how one BIOS maker
implements password protection of hard drives. However, it sounds like
your Windows reinstall wiped some password that was recorded, probably a
hashed value in the registry, by some security software installed under
that old and now gone instance of Windows; i.e., it sounds like you had
some software security product managing the on-disk password rather than
using the hardware method (via BIOS). Presumably any software-managed
security product should provide a means of exporting the password to
other removable or remote media so you can later perform a restore.
Only Sony probably knows for sure how to unlock a password-protected
hard drive but you'll have to be ready to provide proof that it is your
computer.
