sony VGN-SZ483N recovery

Hi, I'm having a sony VGN-SZ483N laptop and have problems booting vista business. Also did not create the recovery disks. Using the F10 I've restored the sytem but it keeps prompting for the application recovery disk after vista starts. The C drive currently shows 130GB total whereas the HDD size is 160, cant find the remaining space as well as cant find the recovery partition as well. Appreciate if someone can help. Thanks

 

I cant help you with the recovery discs. If you don't need the applications there is probably a way to remove the recovery disc prompt after vista starts by using msconfig or manually editing the registry. You could also do a fresh install of vista using a vista cd and your legal vista key.

As for the HDD size discrepancy, this site explains it pretty well.

"for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space."

your 160gb drive would actually be about 148.75gb after being formatted. Also you have the hidden recovery partition which is taking up space. (on my SR vaio its 10.37gb.) (I checked the size of my hidden partiton by booting a ubuntu live cd and running GParted. its 10.37gb, 9.61 used).
Then you have Vista installed and that takes up more space, so 130gb free space sounds about right.

 

I will second S.Prime's recommendation for a fresh install.

Factory installs are usually bloated, old factory installs are a mess.
Keep in mind you will need to back things up first, but this will also allow you to recover the part of the drive hosting the recovery image, since you will no longer need it.

I woudl go a steep further and recommend grabbing a copy of Win7 32bit instead though. The only functionality you will likely lose is the FN brightness adjustment. People here have managed to get almost everything else working like factory on Win7 32bit on the 1st. gen SZs.