Hard drive recovery for VGN-SZ4XWN

[12345jds]

My hard drive was corrupted. Hard drive cleaned and reformatted

Recovery from discs created on machine (when bought) fails as invalid media

Tried to contact help desk who say, cant replace drive, must be original drive, restore discs can be bought from Sony at £49 however you need to call premium line to order !!!! was on it for 10 mins at £0.35 per minute and hadnt even placed order.

Can I use new drive ?

Will Sony recovery discs have the windows installer in them ?

Or shall i just forget Vaio and load windows which i can buy for less than £49 fit my own HDD and move on ?

[Blencogo]

Hi 12345jds and welcome.

Yes, you can use a new drive and you should be able to reinstall  all preinstalled software - including the original OS - onto a new drive and it will recreate the Recovery Partition.  Try using the Recovery Discs you made when the Vaio was new and if there is a problem, try copying the discs using another PC - this sometimes works.  Only if this fails will you need to purchase a new set of discs from Sony.

Just make sure you do not buy one of the new Advanced Format Drives of 500GB or 1 TB as the advanced formatting will not be recognised by the Recovery Dics.  You need a standard SATA hard drive.

[12345jds]

I tried restoring on reformatted drive with original discs without any luck will try copying discs and trying again.

Just popped lid of and drive is 120gb but ide not sata, can i still get ide in 2.5 " ?

[Blencogo]

Yes, you can buy ATA hard drives OK.

BUT recheck as I would be very surprised if a 2007 Vaio model released with Vista installed did not come with a SATA hard drive.  What is the reference number of the HDD? Surely it is SATA!

The specifications here say 120GB 5400 RPM Serial ATA

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3300128/-/Product.html

[KatherineYH]

You can use the Recovery Partition to do the System Recovery. You can access the Recovery Partition using the "VAIO Recvery Wizard" software installed in the Computer.

    On the taskbar, click the Start button, point to All Programs , point to VAIO Recovery, then click the VAIO Recovery icon.

    In the VAIO Recovery window, click to select the "Restore C: Drive" option to do the System Recovery.

    Then, in the Restore C: Drive window, click to select the I understand box.

    After that, click the Next button.

    After the bundled applications are installed, under Restore C: Drive (Step 4 of 4) , click the Finish button.

    The computer will restart and the operating system setup wizard will begin.

    Please follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup wizard.

All the best...

_______________

Life is too serious to be taken seriously

[12345jds]

Could not use HDD recovery as HDD was corrupt

Cleaned HDD and reformatted as new drive

Managed to reload using original restore discs, what a time consumining process and then of course i had to install every update and service pack from windows !!!!

If I make a new set of recovery discs will it include all the updates etc or will it just be a copy of original version ?

Or is there a way to copy HDD to make a reinstall quicker and easier ?

Thanks

[Blencogo · Accepted solution]

Recovery discs only contain a copy of the Recovery Partition in its factory condition.  It does not update at all.

If you want to make an excact 'mirror' of your drive to include updates, data, programs and settings, you need something like Acronis True Image and an external hard drive.

http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/products/trueimage/