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Sony Vaio will not start in safe mode or normal mode

I am having a problem with a sony vaio pcv-rx770 computer. The computer has a cd Rom, dvd/cd burner and a floppy drive. The computer will not start in normal mode or safe mode. I reformated and reinstalled XP on the hard drive. how ever if I put the hard drive in another PC it will start up fine and I also tried putting a hard drive with windows 98 on the sony PC and it started up fine. In my opinion there is something wrong with the motherboard. Maybe I need to flash the bios? I was also getting an error message "Line 3595 of the INF file \I386\txtsetup.sif is invalid" But the hard drive is fine because it will start normally on another computer Also I tried using another hard drive with XP on the sony PC and the same thing happened it won't start. It will just go to the F8 menu that ask you to start in safe mode or normal mode. This computer is for a friend of mine I have been working on it for 3 days but I am running out of solutions. Also If I chose one of the F8 menu options the computer will just restart and bring me back to the same point.
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Godxilla2001

If what coral47 doesnt work you can try this. Clear the CMOS by taking the CMOS battery out or using the jumber to do so if available. Format the hard drive with a Windows 98 bootdisk www.bootdisk.com and then do a clean install of XP.

Have you installed any new memory or hardware of any kind to the machine?

dkwymer

ASKER

What coral47 suggested unfortunately did not work. I can't even access the CD-rom drive. I set the CD-rom to be the first boot disk and it just did the same thing. The computer just keeps restarting. I have not installed any new memory or hardware. I will however try to clear the cmos. I have already reformated the hard drive and did a clean install of XP. Do I need to do it again after clearing the Cmos?

>> Do I need to do it again after clearing the Cmos? << You shouldn't.

Hmmmmm.....Might be a hardware problem. Could be the Ram.
Take out, unplug, or disable unplug everything but one HD, one stick of ram (at a time, if more than one), video and cpu, and see if it still does it. If yes, ram or cpu might need to be reseated or replaced.
The thing that makes it hard to figure out, is that the W98 HD worked in this system. And it seems to run long enough to install XP before it starts looping.

Godxilla2001

I would try to reset the CMOS first and you can put the boot order back to normal just dont put a floppy drive in and it should go to the CD ROM second which is fine and when your in the bios try resetting all the settings back to the default. If you have an older version of windows around you can put maybe ME or 98 on your machine and see if that will load if it does then you can put Your xp cd in after your older os loads and then you can load XP on again.

Godxilla2001

IF the 98 HD was built on another machine and put into the the machine yoru working on then it was built with the same drivers as the other machine so it might work or appear to work for a little whie but issues will come up later if you continue to use it unless the other machine is exacly the same as the one your working on. Thats why when you put the 98 HD in it seems to work and then when you load XP you have problems. I think its a driver issue somplace or a corrupt intall file. If it was hardware then when you put the 98 HD in you would have the same issue. XP can be tricky sometime and even more so if your system is a little older. CLEAR the CMOS and keep the drive you are going to use in the computer and Re-Format and put 98 or ME on and then upgrade or do a clean install with XP on the same drive.

Thank you much. : )