Hi, My home computer which is a Sony Viao with Windows XP unexpectedly won't boot up after my daughter used it. It says that I need to select a boot device but doesn't give options to choose from. Does anyone know what needs to be done?

That's kind of hard to diagnose without seeing it... I guess the first thing I'd try is make sure there is not a CD, or floppy disk in the computer. I've never used a Sony, but on a lot of computers when you first turn them on and it shows the manufactures flash screen, you can hit ESC to see what is actually going on. Try to do that, and see if it is finding your hard drive or not. If it does not, you may either need to re-configure it in your BIOS (which is not hard, but since pretty much every computers BIOS is setup differently, I can't explain it... sorry) or possibly buy a new hard drive.

Thanks. She may have been playing a game and left a CD in. If not I'll try your other selections.

If the "select boot device" message appears it is likely to be that a CD has been left in the CD drive and the BIOS is treating the CD as the first bootable device.

If the message is something like "no boot device found" then the BIOS has most likely lost its settings... on the VIAO simply press the "F2" key as it boots and when presented with the BIOS options select, Boot devices: check the HDD settings are correct, if they are blank set to Auto, if they are okay, set the CD/DVD as first/primary boot device and HDD as second, save and exit ("press F10") all you need to remember now, is to remove any "non bootable" cd/dvd from the drive before booting!.

Thanks, we'll try this as we checked and there's no CD in.

Some of the BIOS's out there have a boot menu that will show you the drives you can boot from and the order in which they are tried. If you have such a feature this will usually happen after the prompt to enter Setup/BIOS.

Short of that you may very well have a bad hard drive. That does not necessarily mean that the data on that drive is lost though. You can purchase a USB drive enclosure for about $20, put the drive in there and see if you can access it.