no such animal, unfortunately.

Plug the drive in and reboot. That should work.

If not, Start >System>HWPnP>"Force Install USB" should.

tried the start>sys> etc option first....

there was 'install USB devices' and Force install devices'

I tried both.... still no good.... rebooting with the drive hooked up now....

...although last time I did that it hung start up....

nothing is easy

goodgodalmighty, restarting it worked.

please to pm me your address so I can mail you some of jinx's oatmeal cookies.

kthx

I posted in this thread, don't i deserve some cookies?

ok, so now how do i get to the restore menu again?

i keep getting this now.

Send your address, I'll make a double batch.
Srsly

am i sure i want to do a restore?

do i do restore C

or restore complete system?
I think I'll wait to hear the answer to that before I do anything hasty.

Cheer up Jim, if the car business goes south you can join the Geek Squad with your newfound knowledge.;)

Restore the complete system. Then get a hold of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 and install it before you install any other patches!

Outstanding! Feel the power of the cellar! Woot!

I posted a joke way back when - does that mean Icanhazoatmealcookies?

In between snoozes this morning, I had a dream that jinx was sending cookies to like 13 different people.

Congratulations guys. What a great example of the power of perseverance.

I've got to differ with mb on this one. If you have everything you wanted off of the machine, I'd completely reformat the drive, do a clean re-install, and run extensive tests on the drive before I'd trust it with anything.

Pete,

The Sony restore utility takes care of that for you from a different partition.

Sony doesn't give restore disks out. That 8GB partition is what he has to restore the system.

The tests we ran indicate that there's no apparent physical issue. CHKDSK would have crapped itself many times over had there been one.

If you want to run physical tests, go ahead.