VAIO VPC Z HDD model Recovery Disk without DVD writer

Hi,
I finally got my VPC Z with HDD/no DVD today and I thought I'd start up a thread on the subject for those like me who once receiving their Z will be trying to use Vaio Recovery Center to create recovery disks without using a DVD Writer.

Installing Win 7 from a USB stick is fairly well documented on the web but the problem above isn't, certainly not for the VPC Z anyway. I know that it's probably gonna be simpler to just create a bootable USB key/stick and copy the relevant drivers to it and use that (something I'll be doing to get rid of all the crapware sony have preinstalled) but I like having the security of an additional backup solution just in case I royally balls it up.

The main issue (i think) is with Vaio Recovery Center itself, if you try to create the recovery disk the software will complain that no dvd writer can be found. After trying a couple of virtual CD/DVD/BD-ROM/HD-DVD tools I took the advice of TofuTurkey (cheers fella) in the vaio owners thread and tried Virtual CD. I'm happy to report that this has the capability to create a fake drive with various fake media discs and does indeed fool the Vaio software into creating an ISO to the internal hard drive. I setup a DVD+R DL drive and everything went smothly. Vaio Rocovery created a single ISO 5,344,117KB in size.

Seems the next trick is to find a way of creating a bootable USB stick (again there's plenty of info out there concerned with installing Win 7) and then writing the ISO (or contents of?) it to it and filing it away for safe keeping. ZoinksS2k mentioned I should be "sure to set the partition to Active and run bootsect to make it bootable." which is going to be my next step after I've read up a little again on this.

Anyway I hope this help anyone in the same predicament.

Does anyone else have a better solution/experience of doing something similar? Cheers.


EDIT: Sorry posted this is the wrong forum, can someone delete or move it for me. I can't find a way of doing so.

 

I've yet to figure out how to boot, and completely run, the Sony recovery environment from a USB drive. The disc changing logic when you do the install keeps you from progressing to the next disc. You can't join all the files into one directory either.

Installing a clean Win7 is pretty trivial tho.

I think Sony planned on users just rebuilding the OS from the recovery partition on non-optical models.

If I had this config, I'd just make a Ghost image of the entire drive as a backup.

 

Yay, a fellow HDD-Z

Try Diskpart:
How can I create a bootable USB flash device running Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) 2.0?

I tried a whole bunch of ways to get my Windows 7 onto a USB stick. I started with OS X but it got painful. I'm not sure if it's a problem with Apple's DiskUtil, or with dd, or ??? (forgot other stuff I tried). I then tried creating the Win7-64bit USB using a Win7-32bit machine but I needed bootsect (which I didn't know how to get since I didn't buy anything from MS and I'm too chicken to download from non-MS sites).

The funny (in a painful way) thing was that after I gave up, burned the DVD and installed Win7, I accidentally left the USB in the Z when it was booting and the Win7 installation started from the USB :facepalm:.

I think not all USB sticks can boot, and one fine day I shall sit down and think about this more...

 

Apparently USB formatted in FAT32/exFAT could not used as a boot disk. No problem with NTFS. Anybody has similar experience?

AFAIK diskpart and bootsect method is the fastest way to set up a bootable USB drive.

 

I would boot a linux USB version, then make a dd copy of the master boot record and recovery partition. Then, if I needed to recover, dd them back, and do a disk restore.
That's much smaller than ghosting the entire drive, and free too (well, apart from the USB key, of course)

 

Is it possible to copy my sony vaio Z recovery partition into a bootable usb drive?

I have done so, but when booting from the USB drive, it loads up the recovery console, which allows me to select if i would like to do a system recovery (back to factory settings) after selecting a full system recovery. It promptly restarts and boots from the USB drive again, an endless loop.

I have burned the recovery partition into "recovery discs" as per the technical support's suggestion, it works. But i would love to have it on a USB stick instead of it on DVDs.

I have done the same for my desktop computer to install windows 7. Its the Sony's recovery that i experience an endless loop.

The recovery partition was initially "hidden" i went to "unhide" it using diskpart and subsequently copied the entire partition to a bootable usb stick.
Have i missed something out?



Well, the total size is just under 14gb. The reason why i wanted to use the preinstalled recovery partition is that i would not have to download and install drivers. Although there are some bloatwhere which i could live without. Adobe photoshop elements is something i really appreciate being in there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Already posted in other thread.
Use Virtual CD 10. It´s not free

 

Why not just plug in an external drive to create/restore your recovery media? Why overcomplicate things?