Hard Drive Failure Question

[simbaron2]

My OEM hard drive has failed due to bad sectors, I've tried seatools and whilst it IS able to recover bad sectors (obviously seagate keeps spare sectors) it is recovering from sector 1!

There is no way i was going to spend my entire life sat fixing 100 odd sectors at a time in hope its not the entire disk as the drive is giving a test code back to sugest otherwise, so i wiped it out and put it in a caddy but the drive (spinning) will not run chkdsk, nor will the drive format.

So i'm just going to purchase a new drive, now my question is, is it possible to install the hidden recovery partition on the new drive?

i have a vista OEM disk, day 1 recovery disks and a recovery disk from when i re partitioned the hard drive to create a data partition with moved default folder paths.

[stephanius]

Hello simbaron2,

when you recover your VAIO with it's VAIO Recovery discs, the recovery partition will be created again.

From your description it sounds like you created images of your own installation,but you do not mention having the VAIO Recovery Discs.

If your images are images made of the entire hard disk drive - including the hidden recovery partition - you should be able to restore it that way.

As long as the new hard drive has at least as much capacity as the old one, you don't need to expect any trouble from the recovery tool - you want to use the custom partition size option though.

Message was edited by: stephanius

[simbaron2]

thanks stephnius,

i used the recovery center to create the disk/disks as the laptop was not shipped with official rescure disks.

do you know if the recovery center disks cover the hidden partition? i'm guessing not as it only created 2 disks on the origional 1 partition and 1 disk after i shrinked the the disk to create a 75gb boot and 125 data partitions.

[stephanius]

Hi Simbaron2,

The recovery discs you create with VAIO Recovery Center do indeed restore the hidden partition and the windows partition.

When your VAIO prompts you to burn the recovery discs and you do so, you are safe - even if you replace the physical hard disc drive.

Only two discs means still just over 8GB space. Considering that Windows itself fits on one DVD, that is plenty of extra space for the remaining modules. Since the recovery partition holds pretty much the same data as the recovery discs, which is in turn needed to recreate the original windows partition, this is not an either or situation.

[simbaron2]

Ok my new hard drive is in, i DO NOT have sony recovery disks, just the ones created by the recovery center.

the problem is the disks are not bootable?? my bios is set to boot off the disc but it won't.

i've installed vista off the OEM vista disk i have but i don't seem to be able to install recovery center i've downloaded  from the sony website.

the installer runs but stops and doesn't install.

my model is a VGN-NR38S i'm using the downloads from http://genesis.sony-europe.com/instranet/ccil_sony/selfservice/index.jsp?l=en_GB&m=VGN-NR38S_S

Message was edited by: simbaron2

[stephanius]

So, you have a non-Sony Vista install disc and a set of discs you created yourself.

You state that you created these discs using 'Recovery Center'. That should be 'VAIO Recovery Center'. This is used to burn the SONY recovery discs, but also links to the Windows Backup and Restore options.

Since you state that you cannot boot from the discs you created, I assume that you used Windows Complete PC backup. To restore that image, follow these instructions:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Restore-your-computer-from-a-system-image-backup

Alternatively, you can contact VAIO support and purchase the recovery discs for your model.

[simbaron2]

Thanks for the reply.

I used sony's "recovery Center" to create the disks, 1 lot at day 1 and 1 lot after i had set the machine up as i liked it.

after the hard drive died i tried to use the disks but they are NOT bootable.

So i used an origional vista disk i have to install vista back on.

i then went to the sony support section to add the drivers and utillitis + origional programs.

HOWEVER i can not get many of them to install?? including sony's recovery center which quits part way through the install and just closes without giving a reason.

the only things to install correctly are "viao update" and "wireless function"

others DO install but there is no GUI and are not listed in the "all programs section" of the vista menu.

Looks like i'll have to buy the disks via sony support.

thanks anyway.