Sony N230N Series - How to reinstall Vista?

I have two Sony VGN-N230N Laptops, and having worked with Sony latptops for the last 3 years I felt very comfortable with them. These were the first I ordered with Vista...

It was terrible... it's half the speed, if that, of a simarly equiped BX series and tons of bugs, it was like Windows ME all over again. Hibernate didn't work, and if it did, coming out of it would FUBAR the network drivers and I had to reboot anyway.

So I figured I'd downgrade one to XP...
Same problems as others noted- no driver support for XP.

Now I figured fine, I'll just go back to Vista, and I went to the one I didn't touch to make recovery DVD's like I would on any other Sony Vaio laptop of the last 3 years.

No dice... Nothing.

Vista Business has it's built in backup feature, I suffered through that to make 3 full DVD's but none of them are bootable- that only works if Vista is still working enough to load the data off of them...

There's no boot disc whatsoever??? What if I wanted to upgrade the hard drive on this thing, or replace a bad drive? How would I install enough to get Vista going.

There's a partition on the laptop I didn't downgrade that has a lot of recovery options- none of them are to make restore/boot discs... That's all well and good if the problem isn't the hard drive, but 9 times out of 10, the problem IS the hard drive.

Am I missing something here? How could they possibly release a system you can't upgrade or replace the hard drive for?

 

Oh boy, I'll try to do my best.

A. It's user's resposibility to make Recovery Discs (now that they're pretty much partitioned).

Since you didn't make the Recovery Discs, next step is Recovery Partition. This is where I got lost. Your N230N should have a partition, and pressing F10, F11, or F12 would normally start the recovery sequence upon bootup (depending on maker of course).

I'm fairly positive Sony's come with recovery partitions, if not you're SOL.

Unless you use your OTHER notebook you mentioned. It must be the SAME model as the one you downgraded, due to drivers, etc.

Use Acronis and make a direct image of your HDD onto a desktop. This is going to require you taking out your HDD and connected it to a desktop via cables that are packed in home-kit external closures. Make a copyof the HDD that is loaded with Vista, format your drive that was downgraded and reload the image that you made. So you're basically making a pure 1:1 copy. This works as long as it's the same notebook model, due to drivers and whatnot.

Other than that, you can order the recovery discs through Sony I guess.

 

I intended to make recovery disks, as I had 2 indentical models I figured I'd use the other one to make the recovery discs.

The problem was that on Vista there is now no "Recovery" icon in the control panel or ont he start menu like there was on XP.

When I used F8 to get to the recovery console (not f10 anymore, but the same as for 'safe mode') there was access to the revoery utlities on the sony partition, but none of the options was to make recoery CD's.

Luckily after talking with tech support, who by the way said they do not have recovery discs for this model available, I was still able to make the recovery DVD's... It just wasn't at all intuitive to get to the old style recovery console from which to make them.

The "new" Vista way is to click on the start logo -> Type in "Help and Support" click on it, then choose "Recovery" from the menu and then follow the links to make recovery DVD's.

Thanks.

 

Haha yea, I know it's a pain. It's not MS's fault about the hidden Recovery Disc creation however. HP's, Compaq, Acer, Gateway, eMachines are all up-front with the option.

I found the Recovery Disc option on the Sony by using the Sony Help program and typing Recovery. Not good in my opinion. HP, Compaq and Acer does a popup refering to making your Recovery Discs asap.