Help! Unable to Recover Vaio AX580G

Hi!

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-AX580G that comes loaded with OEM Windows XP MCE. It crashed and in the course of trying to fix it, the entire OS was blown out. So I took out the Sony Factory Recovery Disks and started the full system recovery.

It seems to run fine until it starts the "Restoring C Drive Phase (around 50% complete bar). At the 55% mark I get hit with an Error 400 unable to continue deal. Then it reboots and tries again with the same result.

I am not excited to send this thing to Sony for repai, so this forum may be my last hope.

 

sounds like a bad restore disk...you may try copying the restore disk in a different machine and trying it again--I sometimes have luck with this when a cd is of marginal condition

 

Well these were factory disks that I ordered direct from Sony's parts center but I did think that when I got the alert the first two times so I burned a set of copies on another computer but still have the same issue. And I dont have a spare machine to do a test run on.

Spoke with Sony Tech support again about 30 minutes ago and the dude stated that Error 400 on their support manuals is associated with memory so I took the 2 1 GB sticks I had put in and returned the original factory 2 512's and am trying again.

Thanks for that feedback though and please if anyone else has suggestions, I can use em

 

interesting...and please report your results if it works with the original memory

 

Amazing! The system is restored after putting in the original RAM (2 512 sticks). I have no idea why that would do the trick but it did. And I once again replaced the factory RAM witht he 2 1GB sticks with no problems.

I can only assume that it is a possibility that there is some hard coded statement in the restoral installation routine that allocates it to either specific memory addresses or something like that.