Issues since factory restore of Vaio Z

Recently did a factory restore of my Vaio Z running Windows 7 using the Vaio Care tool and while it mostly went ok, I'm having a couple of problems which may or may not be related.

Firstly, hibernation is no longer working. If I hibernate using the start menu or by pressing Fn+F12 Windows simply locks itself without actually hibernating. If instead I type shutdown /h from the command line, I get an error: "The system cannot find the file specified.(2)"

Secondly, Windows Backup doesn't work. It runs for a while before failing with a similar error: "The system cannot find the file specified (0x80070002)".

Additionally, if I navigate to Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery, the "Default Operating System" dropdown is empty. I'm guessing that's not good, although Windows seems to boot up fine.

After a bit of googling all of this leads me to believe there's a problem with the boot loader. I did initially think of booting from a Win 7 DVD and trying to repair the boot loader, but was unsure if this would affect the ability to boot/restore from the Sony recovery partition in the future.

Does anyone have ideas on how best to fix these problems? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I would just reinstall again, restoring the complete system from the Vaio DVDs.

 

If windows boots fine, what makes you think it is the bootloader that is the issue. I doubt if the loader has ANYTHING to do with this issue.

Gary

 

1. try cmd, "powercfg -h on"
2. windows backup doesn't work well on network storage, try usb external storage
3. try bcd editor, make a system image before doing it

 

Thanks for the replies...

Well... it may not be the boot loader per se, but "something" to do with the boot configuration or the way the SSD is partitioned perhaps... not sure. The first clue was the missing OS entries under Advanced System Settings -> Startup and Recovery -> Default Operating System. I also tried running bcdedit /enum and it ran into the same "system cannot find the file specified" error. Finally I tried EasyBCD, again the same thing.

For a start it would be handy if these error messages mentioned which file it can't find, but nooo... that would be too easy.

Tried "powercfg -h on" (and also tried turning it off and then back on) to no avail. I'm using an external USB drive for the backup. As mentioned above, bcdedit wasn't playing ball either.

Yeah, I may end up trying that.Would restoring from the DVDs - as opposed to using Vaio Care from Windows - delete everything (including the recovery and the small system partition) and rebuild from scratch? If it leaves the recovery and in particular system partition alone I suspect it might not solve this issue... but I suppose it's worth a try either way. What could possibly go wrong?

 

The recovery partition should suffice. Just shut down and boot using the assist button instead of the power button. If you create recovery media, it just images the data from the recovery partition anyhow.

Any application you installed that could be causing this?

 

Can't think of any, no.

I found a thread that describes almost exactly the same set of symptoms I've encountered here and one of the things mentioned is that if a drive letter is assigned to the hidden partition backup and hibernate start working... so I tried the same and sure enough they do. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a better/neater solution so I may just live with the hidden partition being visible. A very strange problem