Solved! How to fix this?

[Irenette]

Hello guys I'm new here. I own an old Sony Vaio VPCCA35FG (Purchased in 2011). So apparently about a month ago, my laptop was having a problem (bad sector) with its hdd and I figured because of its age this problem would occur sooner or later. I replaced it with a new hdd and installed win 7 ultimate on it. But as you guys probably already know, Vaio has its own manufacturer drivers, and I really need the AMD driver to work but it just can't seem to be installed properly. I tried to duplicate the old hdd for its recovery partition so I could just install the manufacturer win version but when I finished duplicating, the recovery partition in my new hdd didn't even boot. I'm out of options here, since when I bought it, there was no recovery CDs or whatsoever. Anyone has any idea how to fix this?

 

[tomanon]

A few years ago someone gave me a VAIO with a crashed harddisk. After replacing the HD and loading Windows, I had to load ALL the drivers. I did this by using another computer to gather the drivers from the Sony website (they seem to keep legacy drivers available for quite a while) and saved them on either a CD or a Thumbdrive, (I don't recall which). Pay attention to the full Model and Serial numbers of the VAIO, each character is important to get the correct drivers.

From there, the drivers were re-installed on the VAIO. Not all of them worked correctly. It turns out that the ORDER the drivers were installed was critical. If something didn't work as expected the process was started over with the problem drivers loaded earlier or later in the process. Eventually most of them worked and a few others mostly worked; I settled for that!

Have Fun!

 

[Irenette]

A few years ago someone gave me a VAIO with a crashed harddisk. After replacing the HD and loading Windows, I had to load ALL the drivers. I did this by using another computer to gather the drivers from the Sony website (they seem to keep legacy drivers available for quite a while) and saved them on either a CD or a Thumbdrive, (I don't recall which). Pay attention to the full Model and Serial numbers of the VAIO, each character is important to get the correct drivers.

From there, the drivers were re-installed on the VAIO. Not all of them worked correctly. It turns out that the ORDER the drivers were installed was critical. If something didn't work as expected the process was started over with the problem drivers loaded earlier or later in the process. Eventually most of them worked and a few others mostly worked; I settled for that!

Have Fun!

Hello buddy thank you for your reply and forgive me for my late response. Ok so I tried to search for the order of the driver installation for my laptop type but unfortunately I couldn't find any. I also tried to remember the order that the recovery did around 2 years ago but I guess I can't remember it well. I also tried to perform recovery option on my broken hdd just to trigger the sequence so I could write down the order of the drivers but the hdd is really in bad shape so I can't do anything at this point. Of course I've tried many combinations of order manually hoping it'd work somehow but the problem always occurred after I installed the AMD driver. I do really need to get this laptop to work since this is a beloved gift from an important person lol. If you can give me some more ideas that'd be so great, thanks a lot and have a good day.

 

[hang-the-9]

Drivers are here https://www.sony-asia.com/electronics/support/laptop-pc-vpc-series/vpcca35fg/downloads

They are a bit of a mess though to sort through, generally you want the chipset drivers first, then the rest. Did not see anything on there for chipset but a lot of drivers for the components. There are Mobile HD graphics drivers as well as just Graphics drivers and some things for AMD specifically. Have a local computer tech look at the system. Without having the system there to install things to see what is needed for your laptop it will be pretty much impossible to sort out the exact drivers you need.

 

[tomanon]

Just a vague recollection here, I seem to recall that there was more than one version of the Graphics chip on the VAIO, so you may have the wrong version of AMD drivers for your hardware.

It sounds like you have at least some functionality working. perhaps you can find out what Graphics chip model is in the machine to get the correct driver... or perhaps it is the overall chipset drivers as @hang-the-9 suggested. If that's the case, the EXACT model, serial, and version numbers should lead you to the correct driver download.

pause, rummage, rummage around...

I just looked for the VAIO hoping I had some documentation. It's been two moves since I worked on it and I can't even find the computer at the moment! I'm sure it's here SOMEWHERE... too many boxes for it to hide in.