my Vaio VGN-NR38S has had its hard drive wiped. please advise booting recovery off USB drive, thanks

[.nmacgregor]

my Vaio VGN-NR38S has had its hard drive wiped. please advise booting recovery off USB drive, thanks

[Blencogo]

Have you read the Troubleshooting and Recovery Guide for your model?

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/Manuals/RecoTS/2008Q2_TRG_EN.pdf

I think you can only run a recovery from the internal DVD/CD-ROM drive or from the hidden Recovery Partition on the hard drive (if it still exists).

When you turn the Vaio on do you see the Vaio Logo splash screen produced by the BIOS?