Sony Vaio pcg-fx370, during boot up primary Drive not found, replaced hard drive with new one & same result; nothing appears to be wrong, in the bios, none of the selections for setting up the hard drive will make it recognize it during boot. tried toshiba and western digital drives. both will boot in a usb port on a desktop, but fail in notebook. Would a bios update possibly improve this or is there another bus port I could hook the drive to in order to get the drive to recognize it? or ....
should I seek a professional repair service?

Mark Gordon, January 2008

Well, I have a PCG-FRV26 and I have had issues with the motherboard before, but I have never had an HD "not found" error. In your case, replacing the original HD did no good. The PCG series ship with a Toshiba HD (40GB, I'm guessing), and mine had bad sectors on it from day 1. In your case, I don't know why a new drive would fail, unless the bios got tweaked. Check Sony eSupport for original or updated bios. There are currently three Bios updates available for your motherboard. Here's the link: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=PCGFX370 installing all of these in order would definitely be a worthwhile first step.

You also might try holding down the following keys while pressing the power button to turn on your computer "ctrl+alt+f2". Hold them down until the animation logo is finished. This should reset your Bios.

If none of this works, your best bet will be to get your Sony serviced by a pro (by that I mean you will need to have your motherboard replaced.)
Hope this helps!

sewellp@yahoo.com

Patrick Sewell, January 2008