OS wont boot up! Surface Scan Test Failed! vaio 4 months old...

[Blitzwing]

Hi there,
I am from Germany and bought my sony vaio vgn-fe 21h 4 months ago. Now I am in Japan and doing some market research for a small company.
I was very satisfied with my notebook. But now, it wont boot windows xp
anymore. Well, it tries to boot up until one can see the windows xp bootup logo, but then a blue screen appears for a second and the
notebook makes a restart. Safe mode doesn`t work either.
So I ran a Hardware diagnostics check and the result was:
Surface Scan Test: Failed !
It seems to be a problem with the hard disk. Is there no way, how I
can get my data back? Should I open my notebook and try to connect the
hard disk to another computer? Would I loose my warranty, if I did
that?
The problem is, I need my data really urgently for work. So it would
be a catastrophe, if I had to wait for 2 weeks until I get my notebook
back. I`m also afraid, that they would just put in a new hard disk and
throw the old one away. But I REALLY need the data I reasearched in
the last 5 months. (And please no comments about making backups! I know now, how important this is!!!)

Did anyone have similiar problems with his vaio? Has someone made
experience with the "technical response center"?

Thanks and best regards from Tokyo,
Matthias.

[Blitzwing]

I just noticed, that the battery stopped charging... Can this be related to a harddisk problem? That would be strange...

[samtheman]

Sounds like the exact same thing thats happened to our Vaio, its just three months old to the day! I can get into ours intermittently, sometimes a restart allows us in, but not always.

Message was edited by: samtheman

[Blencogo]

Hi samtheman and welcome.

A failed surface scan implies physical damage to the platters in the hard disc - often caused by moving the laptop while the drive is reading/writing or by a bump or bang. If I were you, I would contact Vaio Support to see about a repair under warranty.

If you have any further questions on this forum we would love to hear from you but please start your own discussion. Resurrecting a five year old discussion is of little use to anyone as the technology has changed so much, so I will lock this thread.