How can I restore my Vaio PCV-V1 back to its factory settings

[wyndy06]

Hi,

I have recently bought a new pc and want to give my old PC to my son. We are trying to restore it back to its factory settings and have used Vaio recovery and documentation disc but this just reinstalls applications and on the option to recover the operating system this just shuts down and restarts but nothing has happened. I have tried Alt PF10 at start up but no joy and I have just tried PF10 and again no joy. Does anyone have any suggestions?

From a frustrated mum

[rich912]

Hi wyndy06,

The PCV-V1 shipped with recovery disks (Windows XP) and doesn’t have a recovery partition.

Check that the boot order in the BIOS is set to CD drive at the top of the list – tap F2 at boot to enter BIOS. Then try booting with the recovery disk in the drive.

If that fails to work then the disk(s) may be corrupted or dirty – try cleaning.

Rich

[wyndy06]

ah probably should have mentioned that my CD drive is broken so I am running the recovery CD through an external CD drive via the USB. I did what you said and changed it to the USB CD drive in the list (not really sure if that was what I should have done) then ran the disc and clicked on recover operating system, it restarted but all was still the same. arrrgggggggggg. Oh the disc was sealed and had never been opened so could it still be corrupt? its loading fine and gives me the option to recover op system but just does not do it.

Cheers Claire

[rich912]

Hi wyndy06,

In that case I think the problem is that the recovery process requires booting from the CD and this machine is not capable of booting from USB.

As far as I am aware, to use the recovery disks, you will need to replace the CD drive.

Rich

EDIT:

To check out this theory try booting from another Windows install CD/DVD.

Message was edited by: rich912

Message was edited by: rich912

[wyndy06]

Thanks for taking time to help Rich. I'll keep trying. Might just have to delete everything and then reinstall each individual item.