Created recovery media for Sony VPCF233FX

I've had this laptop for going on 2 years and just created a set of recovery DVD's. Wanted to make sure they were OK so I installed a 90GB SSD in the laptop and started the recovery process. Everything is fine, but I had to swap the DVD's each, at least three times (I figure the first time through was to verify they were ok before it began, then swapped two more times before completing for whatever reason). After I created the DVD set, I wanted to create a USB flash drive. It said it needed a flash drive with at least 12GB of space, I had a 16GB drive that had 14.8GB free when empty, yet this drive would not show up as an option. I tried it on both USB 3.0 slots (which work fine), but didn't try it in the USB 2 slot (that's where my mouse receiver resides). Does anyone know if in fact I need a larger USB drive, or that it has to be done from the USB 2.0 port? I'd really like to make a recovery USB drive to save from swapping those darned DVD's. Although It's not like I'll be doing this often, I just like my options. Just wanted to verify it works so that I can use the original 640GB HDD for something else, it's been sitting on a shelf for over a year after having been cloned to a 500GB SSD, in case I needed to re-clone or re-install.

 

The problem with creating recovery media on a USB flash drive was the fact that I was trying to use a SanDisk Brand flash drive. After doing a little research, SanDisk is certified Windows 8, which means the drive will load as a local disk as opposed to a removable disk. The Sony recovery program requires that the flash drive load as a removable disk to even be seen. Once I put in a PNY 16GB flash drive, I was able to create a bootable recovery key for restoration.

There's no work around to enable the use of newer SanDisk drives, I had two, both were certified Windows 8. Lots of complaints about this on the SanDisk forum on their own website.

 

Thanks for telling us about this.

 

Ironically, the MSI recovery program needs a USB drive to be listed as removable as well, to be seen by the program. The irony is that that laptop came with Win 8, so the Sandisk USB drives wouldn't work with it as well...