Thanks for all the replies. It's now sorted! I had thought it might be the hard drive because at the time the computer crashed it was running hard drive checks because that was the error window then it went black and wouldn't turn on. I rang sony and seems they've had the problem before. A new windows 8 update corrupted my c drive. Meanwhile I managed to recover data from my old hard drive on my old laptop, Safe to say, that's now backed up-twice. Also the recovery media was a freebie with the laptop yeah in the form of a USB stick. On the receipt turns out they were actually supposed to give me 32gb for backing up the system only but the woman in store had given me 16gb which wasn't enough to back up the system. I've now gone back to currys and got them to give me the 32gb USB stick to create recovery media which I'm going to do nuw. Apart from that Sony restored the laptop to factory settings via instructions on the phone and asked me to download a file on their website so the windows update doesn't cause this problem again! I've learnt the hard way to always back up

I meant pc sorry, it autocorrected my spelling. I know I should have backed up and yes that's my fault. I was in the process of sorting this out, as you can imagine that's bad luck when it's failed on me within weeks. I'm not that I.t literate but the system said the c drive was damaged it did some scans and now when it powers on I get the sony vaio logo then a black screen. My partner tried it in safe mode with sonys own way of recovering the data, that failed twice. Guess I might have to pay the £80. I just think that's such a rip off when I bought a laptop which was clearly faulty in the first place. It hasn't been dropped and is pretty much brand new. On a separate point when I got the laptop currys gave me the back up media for the system with the laptop, it came with it so i assumed it would be the right size. When I was setting up the pc and it prompted me to back up the system, what they had supplied wasn't big enough. As I understand it if I was able to back up the system it would gave allowed access to the data?

Hi hoping I can get some advice Bought a Sony vaio laptop from currys and within 2 weeks the hard drive has failed and will now not boot. I intend to send it back to currys and get a new one but this is where my problem lies. When buying they gave me recovery media of 16gb and my oc required minimum 17gb to back up the system, I would have gone to the store to fix this but haven't had the time in the past week or so. When I rang currys to ask how long it needed to be sent away for to get the data off the old laptop and onto a new one they said about 2 weeks and there would be a charge of £80 to transfer my data! I have a lot in there from my previous laptop which I now won't be able to get back without paying but it was their fault for supplying me the wrong size recovery media!! Not to mention if a fault occurs within 2 weeks under the SOGA they should bear the costs. Has anyone had this problem before? Do you think it's worth arguing this point in store that I wasn't able to back up the system because of their mistake?