VGN-FE41S Recovery Help

[PollenPirate]

Recently my computer ran into a spot of bother and became unable to start. This was due to a blue screen of death a few days earlier. Now however I cannot get my computer to recover using vaio recovery tools. I decided it would be best to boot from the recovery partition, then attempt to fully restore to factory settings. However the recovery utility would run for about 10 minutes, then I'd get error 63 (telling me to restart and run utility again). This happens everytime I try to run recovery tools. Thinking this had something to do with my recovery partition, I phoned the support helpline and was told that my recovery partition was most likely corrupted. To rectify this I payed for and received the recovery disks for my vaio. However after trying these recovery disks I get exactly the same error when trying to restore to factory settings, Error 63. On top of this none of the other utilities on the recovery disk will not work as they cannot find my copy of windows vista on the hard drive. Please if anyone can help, I really need to use my laptop! Just in case it helps, my case number is 3799866. Thanks in advance.

[Blencogo]

Hi PollenPirate and welcome to Club Vaio.

Have you tried this?

Make sure you uninstall any Virtual Drive software (like Daemon Tools) and Norton GoBack - these interfere with the EISA Partition.

Resetting the BIOS default values -

1. Turn on your VAIO.
2. When you see the Sony logo, press F2 several times.
3. You will get the PhoenixBIOS Setup Utility window.
4. Press F9 to get default values and then press ENTER to confirm.
5. Press F10 to save changes and exit and then press ENTER to confirm.
6. You have restored the default values and your VAIO will now restart.

Running the Recovery Centre from your hard drive: -

1. Turn on your VAIO. Make sure you are connected to mains AC.
2. When you see the first Sony logo, press F10 repeatedly.
3. This should start the Recovery from your HDD
4. Follow the on-screen instructions for a full, complete reinstall.
5. Do not interrupt the installation even if it seems to have stopped - it may take some time.
6. Run Vaio Update and Microsoft Update
7. Reinstall your own data and software.

Good Luck

[PollenPirate]

My hard drive (other than the recovery partition) has been formatted, so I doubt there should be any virtual driver software still on there. However I did have daemon tools on it, if for any reason its still on there, is there a way to uninstall it without windows booting? As I can't boot vista at the moment. To be honest if this fails I have a copy of windows xp, is it possible to downgrade to xp? As in are there working drivers for the hotkeys, bluetooth, wifi, memory card slots etc?

By the way will try the bios idea, thanks so far.

[Blencogo]

Try resetting the BIOS defaults and then running the recovery from the hard drive by tapping F10 during boot. Forget the recovery discs.

If you run the recovery direct from the hard drive in this way (F10) it will format drive C: and so it will not matter what is installed. However, daemon tools could account for the errors when running a recovery from within Vista.

This should work.

If not XP is possible using the Preinstalled Drivers and Preinstalled Utilities from the VGN-FE31Z which is an identical machine to yours except it was sold with XP installed. Everything should work OK with XP. Just beware the problens of installing XP on a SATA hard drive - try Google!!

VGN-FE31Z Preinstalled Drivers and Utilities

[PollenPirate]

Pressing F10 at startup does nothing, it will not allow me to boot the recovery partition, all that happens is "Operating system not found". Am now trying to recover from disks once more, however still getting issues with Vaio Recovery utility.

When using the recovery disks, the recovery utility creates a new recovery partition, however when this process is complete, the computer requires a restart. Once restarted the recovery utility loads up again however it stops after 01:24 and i get an error, which is as follows:

"An error occurred during recovery. Please start device recovery again from the beginning (ErrorCode=63)"

The "current process" always gets stuck on restoring C drive at 1%. The "complete recovery" bar is stuck at 11%.

I have restored the bios defaults. No matter what I do I get error 63!

[PollenPirate]

Just to clarify, I can boot recovery partition with F10 now, however I cannot restore the C drive without it stopping at 11%.