Sony Vaio FZ - Help With Full Reinstall

I uninstalled Vista from my Vaio FZ445D/B when I bought it and installed Ubuntu and XP pro on it, never erasing the partition with Sony's loader stuff. After just 9 months, my DVD drive is broken and I am still under warranty, with one catch - I need to restore my Vaio to its factory condition for the warranty to be honored by Sony. I made 3 recovery disks the second I first got the notebook.

The problem is now when I try to use the recovery disks, the Sony recovery console tells me "error - no OS found".

Is this because there is no install of Vista on my machine, and the Sony recovery disks somehow need Vista to "communicate with"? Of do I need to delete everything on the machine besides the Sony partition?

(Judging by the size of the data on the SOny recovery disks, there must be Vista and their bundled software on them)

many many thanks in advance.

 

If the DVD drive is broken how are you trying to load the recovery disks? When you boot from the first DVD what options do you get? Not sure what you mean by "the Sony recovery console"?

Since you still have the hidden partition you can do what you want without needing the disks. Just power off and back on. Then start pressing the F10 key. This will cause the machine to boot from the hidden partition.

Gary

 

I agree with Gary ,I also want to know if there are any drivers for win xp for vaio FZ31S because I have vista along time now but I would like to change to xp.

 

@ Gary: sorry, I meant to say that the DVD isnt completely dead, it just skips.. ( I been through all the diagnostic checks to determine whether or not this is an OS problem. It skips in Linux and XP both)

When I boot from the F10 key and get into the console, it tells me there is no OS - is that normal?

@Periklis_Pap: the drivers I found for my FZ445D were at:
ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/FZ19/
( there were still some issues, like webcam, but everything worked for me, even though it is a different FZ model - good luck!)

 

I still don't know what you mean by "get into the console". I am afraid you are going to need to be a bit more specific. Describe this console a bit more. What options do you see? What option are you selecting? And note EXACTLY what the message is, again be specific.

The answer to your question is no it is not normal. But to diagnose it we need more information.

Gary

 

Thanks for the info.