Ive been given an old Sony Vaio Laptop to fix (IDE HDD) Problem: No Operating System Found Checked BIOS, no HDD found Replaced HDD, Checked BIOS > No HDD found HDD is spinning Booted from DVD into Windows setup > No HDD Plugged original HDD into USB adapter to my PC, and HDD is fine So we know the HDD is no the issue, it's getting power to spin up, but machine can not see it I've just finished rebuilding it after taking it apart to see if anything had come loose, but nope, everything looks ok, re-seated every connection / lead / board, cleaned the board off to look for popped caps or anything, everything looks fine Conclusion: Dead / Dying motherboard ?
Controller is dead by the sounds of it.So motherboard is crap.Not worth fixing unless you like a project.
try disconnect the optical drive,and bot it from a USB with MHDDmit can "speak "both to controller or HDD. or maybe it is the mainboard going belly up as jbmcmillan said
.ide HHD ?are sure ?VAIO shouldn't be old enough to use ide .ide is older then the word old !I don't think there ever was sony laptop with ide The issue is ide and not ide .you see ,is need to know its ide or the new (ahci if I recall or such!back then people needed to go set manually this all the time in bios and os .but I have very high doubt your hard drive is ide .its more likely ahci .but Google those two term ,you all have a handle on things in a jiffy!basicly it means the is speak in tomato ,and hard drive speak in watermelon!so they don't know what the other say.
