Hi,
I'm just about ready to lose my temper with my current problem so any help anyone might be able to offer would be appreciated.
I'm running a Sony Vaio laptop, model VGN-FW21L ( Full Specs) running Vista Home Premium; regularly updated.
I was quickly annoyed to find that all but boot device and password options were disabled in the bios, the reason I found out to be to save on tech support costs from people accidently breaking their machines, so what I'm having trouble with is really pushing my patience.
I ran the machine without much issue for a good five or so months with Ubuntu on a separate partition. One day last week it started to act up, slowing to a crawl and not loading task manager. I put this down general use (installing/uninstalling a lot of software) and maybe something malicious that might have gotten through AVG. No biggie I think, I'll just back up my stuff and restore it back to factory settings.
I had a copy of Vista Ultimate that I was no longer using (the machine I had bought it for is now running Windows 7) so I thought I'd install that instead.
Installation went find, except that when I got into Windows I found that very few of the drivers were installed. Luckily it had found something for the ethernet connection so I plugged a good ol' fashioned cable in and let Windows look for some drivers... but it couldn't find any. So then I dug into my computer draw and pulled out the documentation that came with the laptop and ripped open the stiff, cellophane wrapped booklet with the Windows OEM Serial Number on that I had taken to be the installation disk... it was a booklet with a piece of cardboard inside it.
I know what some of you are probably thinking (words like "should" and "made" and "recovery disc") but hear me out.
So I pointed my computer at the Vaio website and went to the driver download page and, as any good computer manufacturer should, a full list of all the drivers needed were there. However, I found that, three hours and two other computers later, not one of the damn things download properly. Whether they were a couple 100 K or over 100mb (graphics) they would download 100kb or so and I would be left with corrupt archive.
At this point I gave up and decided to just restore from the recovery partition. Now I found out that I should have made a recovery disc as soon as I got the laptop. In my defence, I have gone through everything that came with the laptop and the ONLY place it says this, is in the recovery guide... why would I look in the recovery guide if I don't need to recover it? Of course it's at this point I find out that my tweaking of the boot manager for Ubuntu and my installing of a different version of Vista over the old one has ruined any chance of booting into the recovery partition like it should do.
So for the past three evenings I've messed around with the laptop, making the EISA partition visible, messing with BCDedit (this is all new to me) and I've managed to get the recovery partition to show up as boot option, pointing to the etfsboot.com file that I'm fairly sure is the right file, and when I try booting into it I'm face with a Boot Manager error:
Status: 0xc00000e9
Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred.
Does anyone have any ideas? I know that this is my own doing (though this would hardly be an issue if Sony a) were clear in their documentation or b) their support downloads worked) but everywhere on the net seems fairly certain replacement discs (which, lets be honest they should have included in the first place... how much do they really cost?) would cost around £25... which I don't think Sony have earned.
Vaio support line is closed now so I thought I'd try a forum before ringing them tomorrow. I would appreciate any advice (even if it's "Your screwed, buy the replacement disc") anyone can offer.
Sorry for the long post.
Beagrie
Reply Sony Vaio Recovery Partition
Quote:
Originally Posted by joeten View PostIn his post, he said that he had the Vista Ultimate DVD, that can be used as Vista Recovery too. In fact Vista Recovery Disc is a lite version of Vista DVD.
hi and welcome to TSF i cant promise this will work for you since you admit you got things wrong that being said you can try this http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/window...disc-download/ just remember its recovery not reinstall
As a matter of fact, a few hours ago when I read this post, I was looking for solutions to this problem too. Much to my frustration, it turned out to be very simple when it works. I know it's a month old thread but hope that my post will help other that experience this problem in the future.
Actually the mbr on c: has nothing to do with that or it has something to do in some kind of ways, i'm not sure. However, the important thing to know is that the hidden partition do a back-up itself everytime the 'bcd' file where mbr info is contained, is overwritten.
Vaio laptop, like every other laptops that have a hidden partition. This partition itself has an OS to run the Recovery. When C: is installed by another OS (Linux, XP,...) the mbr info is overwritten in every partition that is bootable. This applies to the hidden partition too. That is why you cannot launch the Recovery by pressing Alt F10 or F10 (depending on laptop brand).
To fix this you need a Vista Recovery CD or the Windows Vista DVD itself to launch Vista Computer Repair Service.
In Windows Vista setup first or second windows (depending if you have to choose the language and keyboard type), click Repair Computer in low left corner. It might not list the partition that you wish to repair. Even if it is listed there, you cannot fix it just by repair its boot information from the CD/DVD.
Click Cancel to go back to Vista Recovery wizard where you have many options to repair your computer or restore the system point.
Open the CommandPrompt there.
From the CommandPrompt window, you need to go to that hidden partition. If you know its drive letter, great! Otherwise, just try one by one till you reach there. If it is not there, you can use diskpart to make it available. For command syntax with diskpart http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc766465.aspx
From this partition, use CD command line to get into hidden directory boot. Type dir /a:h to display the file 'bcd' inside this boot folder. You will also see in this directory the backup files of bcd. I don't remember how many times did I mess it up but I saw 4 backup files there. What you do is to restore the original 'bcd' file (usually the oldest backup).
Use the attrib command to remove read-only and system attributes from both backup and current bcd files (type attrib /? if you forget/don't know how). Then use copy command to copy the backup file to the current bcd (type copy /? if you forget/don't know how). You will be asked if you wanted to overwrite the file, type Y then Enter to confirm.
Exit CommandPrompt and restart your computer. Press F10 continuously as POS, you will be able to launch the manufacturer's Recovery Partition.
It took me 3 days of research and thinking to finally figure it out. I could not find a solution by googling but it did help me collect a lot of infos to figure out where the problem was.
Taken from the discussions in the forum. See this discussion on the original page
