Sony VGN-A517M recovery issue

My sister has one of these and gave it to a friend to help her sort an issue out, she does not have the recovery discs(she never created them) now the person partitioned the c drive so its only showing like 7gb and the d drive is showing like 49gb all the vaio software has been deleted and have tried using f10 on reboot to recover the laptop but no success, plus she is constantly hassling me to try and sort it for her.

alli want is to be able to wipe clean and restore it to factory mode.

help please

 

Any one? or is there anywhere i can get the restore disk for this laptop ?

 

I'd say it'd be quite difficult to find a Recovery disc for this particular laptop. Your best bet is to find yourself a Windows XP CD. When you install Windows again, there'll be an option to format the disc back to one partition. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you can then use the Windows XP product key on the underneath of the laptop to activate your new copy of Windows.

The last step is to download the original drivers and utilities, and updates, for your model from here.

It's a bit of work, but is probably the only thing to do if you can't repartition the drive, or find a recovery disc.

 

Tried the windows xp but it did not work?
any other ideas?

 

If it was me, I'd install the Windows 7 RC 7100 on it. It'll be available (legally) for free in the next few weeks and won't expire until sometime in 2010. You can get Vista drivers and utilities from the web page I mentioned above, so that brightness, Fn keys etc will work. With that lovely big 17 inch screen it'd make a nifty media centre laptop.

But that's just me ;-)

Oh, you could also try to repartition the drive back to one partition using any number of free tools (Google is your friend), and if necessary download missing Vaio software from the link I provided previously.

So, lots of options there ;-)