Newbie question about recovery partitions

Hi,

I want to get the Z, but sony doesn't provide the vista dvd, so i need to use the recovery partition.

however, i want to use my own hard drive, so is there a way to "recover" the partition onto my other hard drive?

any help to where i can find some directions would be greatly appreciated

edit: also, does anyone know which company manufactures the Z's ram?

 

The easiest way to copy the drive over is to buy an external 2.5" USB or powered FireWire cabinet, and hook the new drive in there. Then use a backup program that can do whole partitions (like Acronis) or Linux and dd to copy the partition.

As for RAM, I believe Sony switch depending on volume pricing and availability. My Z590 has Hynix RAM, and another user I know has Infineon. If you want to max out the RAM, and make sure you don't mix brands, your best bet is to buy the cheapest option from Sony and then swap out ALL the RAM. If you mix and match, you will still get dual channel, but you may not get synchronous mode unless the SPD timings are identical for both chip boards.

 

thanks for the response!

i'm just wondering, can i just use the sony recovery program and burn the 2 recovery discs that i keep hearing about? can i just use those discs on the new hdd then?

 

yes you can.
if you burn to dvd disc then you will save some GB space in hdd.

 

The problem with the Sony recovery disks is that there's no way to verify them short of doing a system restore. If a DVD fails, you have no restore possibilities at all.
After having made a backup program with a dedicated backup client, I tried the restore DVDs. Created on on high quality DVDs. They failed, about 3/4 through the restore process. Had I relied on them, I would have been S.O.L.

At the very least, make multiple copies.

 

Yes and that is EXACTLY what you should do. Copying the partitions to the new drive as suggested by others in this thread, may very well not work. Other folks have reported issues with the BIOS not being able to find the recovery partition when this was attempted. Using the DVD's is certain to work.

Gary

 

Certain to work, eh?
Using the DVDs did not work for me. The DVDs were created without reported errors, have been ISO-tested without errors, yet trying to restore from them crashes every single time.

With 20 years of system administrator experience, I can tell you that doing a dd will never cause the BIOS to not find a recovery partition. Forgetting to copy the master boot record will, of course. That's no fault of the partition copying, which will create a 1:1 image, bit perfect, unlike the restoration CD, which only backs up what it has been programmed to back up.

You can verify a dd, while there's no way to verify a restore CD short of actually using it. That alone is good enough reason to shun restore CDs. In my case, it failed miserably, and I wasn't even surprised.

 

With 40 years of system admin experience, I can tell you that the issue that was reported was about the fact that as you said the MBR wasn't copied. In another case it was due to the fact that the recovery partition wasn't in the right spot on the hard drive. It seems that in that case the bios was looking for the partition at a hard coded cylinder head and track.

If by "dd" you meant a DISK dup or dump, I agree with you 100% that should work 100% of the time. But the partition copy thing could (and has) been an issue for some folks who didn't understand the particulars of MBR, partition order etc. Not because the partiton copy failed in any way.

Gary

 

thanks so much everyone! i can finally go ahead and order the standard drive and pop my own in! i will try the recovery disc method first, and if that doesn't work, i will try the cloning method =) (i really rather not try this because i don't understand the basics.. don't even understand what an MBR is, macbook pro? hahaha.) and also, one time when i used acronis to clone my drive, the copy came out larger than it was on my original drive and i really don't want to go through that again

thanks again!