Ok vgcharterz, I have a serious laptop problem on my hands.  I have Sony Vaio FW model and it's about 3 years old.   It is running Vista Home Premium(which I believe is the cause of many of the issues). It has an Intel Centrino 2 Processor with a Radeon graphics card (not sure the make or model).  I have had nearly no problems with it until yesterday.  Whenever it boots in normal mode, it works fine for about 5 minutes but then nothin responds but the mouse still moves around so it doesn't completely freeze.  The only way to shut it down is to manually hold the button.  Now if that isn't bad enough, whenever I boot safe mode. the system used to hang at the crcdisk.sys file but I fixed that by deleteing a few system files.  That worked for about 2 times in safe mode, but after that safe mode would automatically restart after logging on.  I tried draining the battery completely and restarting it, but that was no luck.  I did manage to run CCleaner during one of the successful safe mode attempts, but that did almost nothing.  The only thing I can think of is do a complete system restore, but I would really like to at least get safe mode working so I can transfer some of my files to a disk.  I'm guessing some of the registry files are screwing up or the operating system needs reinstalled but the laptop did not come with a Vista disk.  Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.  I am currently at a complete loss...

great advice. and just to add ubuntu can also be launched from a usb stick.

Ok thanks, luckily for me my college gives free version of Windows 7 to the students.  I am going to install that and see if it works and if not I will try the Linux OS.

Usually notebooks with pre-installed OS have no seperate Windows disk. You are expected to make a back up copy of your OS.

I know that's no help, just FYI.

But maybe you can download it or a tool to make a backup on the Sony Vaio website.

Don't worry about losing files. When you upgrade/repair Windows, it dumps everything you previously had installed into a folder called Windows.old by default - you have to explicitly tell it to wipe your hard drive.

Install Win7.

You shouldn't ever delete system files... run Vista repair or spend the few bucks or talk to a buddy and get Win7 installed.

Is that folder still in tact after you delete a partion and reinstall it?

Hey, just so everyone knows, Vista was the culprit yet again. I installed Windows Ultimate 7 and my laptop is working fine (at least for now I hope). I did have to create a new partition though so if anyone knows of a way to reclaim files from a deleted partition I would really like to know but I am fairly certain you can not recover files once the partition is deleted. C'est la vie.

There is a chance the files are still on the disk, but they are very hard to access.

You might be able to find a tool that does it, but, you're best bet is to go to an expert. Unless the files are valuable, I wouldn't bother.

That's the reason why using a Linux live CD, that runs from CD without installing anything, was the best option to check and exclude HW failures and to backup files.
Anyway, as Samuel told you in the post before mine, acting before you wrote too many things on the new partition you still have some chances to recover some files with undelete utilities.

PS If from now on you make for programs and data files partitions separate from the Windows one, you should greatly reduce the risk of data losses in the future. A separate partition for the swap file too is a good thing, as it will greatly reduce the fragmentation of the system partition (after creating and formatting it, you must tell Windows to use it, I'm using Linux now and my Windows installation is broken and not repaired yet, so I can't check the exact steps you must follow for this, but it's easy, just google for windows separate swap partition).