Recovery not working. Please help!

[heppamies]

Hello

I bought a used VGN-TX3HP and it did not come with the recovery discs.

The previous owner has probably installed operating system to the computer from  his own personal discs. There is no VAIO tools available from the windows menu, and i cannot use the vaio FN keys at all. It's just a clean XP installation now, without any programs.

I tried to enter recovery mode by pressing different F10 and F12 keys during the vaio logo bootup, and it didn't help.

if i press F11 the computer fastly reboots, but after reboot it goes to windows, and not into a recovery console.

Can i do anything to restore the original setup ?

Can i check whether the recovery partition still exists, or has it been totally wiped out ?

Thanks!

[rich912 · Accepted solution]

Hi heppamies,

You can check whether the recovery partition exists by opening Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. At the begining of the C drive there should be an EISA partition without drive letter allocation.

Otherwise you can order a set of recovery disks by contacting Support on the premium rate out of warranty number. From the UK this is 0905 0310006.

Rich 

[heppamies]

The recovery section has been deleted from the hard drive.

Will the recovery discs format the harddrive and restore the windows ?

[rich912]

Hi heppamies,

The recovery disks should recover the machine to factory defaults – i.e. as delivered with operating system, drivers, utilities and pre-installed software.

If you only require drivers and utilities these can be downloaded from support.

Rich