Many people do not know this, but when you turn on your computer that is called booting the computer. The first screen you see when you turn your computer on is called the BIOS screen. It usually says your computer manufacturer, which in this case is Sony. Your Sony Vaio computer has the ability to boot from many different storage devices, including the internal hard drive, an external hard drive and even your DVD drive.
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Optical Drive
There are many different programs that can only be used when directly booting them from the BIOS system. This means you will not be booting into Windows to actually run the program. To do this you need to press either the "F2" or "F8" buttons as soon as you see your BIOS screen, which will either say "Sony" or "Vaio." You will be presented with a page with a list of settings that you can change depending on what you need. Click the arrow button until you get to "Boot." If you are running the program off of your DVD drive, you need to select "Optical Drive" as your primary boot up. Press the "Escape" button and select "Save Your Settings" to reboot your computer, but make sure your disc is inside the drive first. Your computer will boot up and your program will run off the disc.
External Hard Drive
You can also boot from an external hard drive. This means you can install an entirely new operating system on a separate hard drive. So while the internal HDD runs Windows 7, your external HDD will be running Windows XP. To do this you will need to boot into the BIOS settings and instead of choosing the optical drive, select the external hard drive option. When you boot up your computer, you will now be running Windows off of your external HDD.
Reinstall OS
Sometimes you need to reinstall Windows onto your machine, for this you will need to go into the BIOS settings and go the path that you went in step 1, booting from your optical drive.
