SZ7: Recovery is not working

I just bought the SOny VGN SZ7 at SonyStyle Germany.
I created a Recovery DVD. I tried to recover from this DVD. It didn't work.
I tried to recover from the hidden recovery Partition. It didn't work either.

I called the VAIO Support. They cannot send me a recovery DVD, because they don't have one.

 

Welcome to the 21st century – where companies like $ony almost solely consist of management and marketing - no real support, almost no engineers and technicians left over...
3 ½ years ago Sony's support wasn't good either but at least some of their notebooks came with factory made recovery DVDs.

Now, if the files on your discs are readable (might check by simply copying to HDD) there is the possibility to apply the image by yourself, completely avoiding recovery (cr)app.
However, this can be lots of work dependent on your skills! Don't know your situation but sending your Vaio back might be easier...

Although I run a clean Vista64 installation, I was curious and did some recovery testing. I manually applied the Sony image from recovery discs using the imagex tool from Microsoft and it worked fine. Your recovery disc probably uses the same format since imagex is free, the file format is designed for Vista, even used by Vista itself.
It's much more work than clicking a few buttons. And the image for my model only had drivers and some stuff installed. So to emulate a complete recovery, I would need to extract stuff from additional recovery files (or download from Sony) to get everything installed. Apparently the recovery app automates this process – applying the saved OS image plus installing additional utils and apps.

Look for big files on your discs – file extensions are probably .wim or .sny – these contain the operating system image plus maybe some additional stuff already installed. To make things worse, some files might need a little hacking so imagex recognizes these.

I use ImageX all the time to backup/restore my OS partitions so I'm used to command line and other low level stuff – WinPE, bcdedit, diskpart... It'll be work to read MSDN documentation – you've been warned! Since I own a different model (AR) my exact steps and commands may differ with yours.

Other forum posts regarding recovery files extraction though concerning apps & utils: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2880418&postcount=23
Some doc links for imagex:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905070.aspx
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...b3ca-4c6c-81f0-6954f671cfe01033.mspx?mfr=true

 

I received a Recovery DVD-Set from Sony Belgium, after the VAIO-Support technician told me, they don't have it.

I installed VISTA again. During the installation, an error message came up saying that I need admin rights for a certain installation. The installation finished and there was no visible problem so far.

No I try to put my old XP on it, I hope that Acronis True Image with the Universal Restore Option does its job.