Installing Vista... I'm a little scared!

[jonathanbull]

Hi,

I've bought a copy of Vista Premium but being the pessimistic person I am, I'm a little anxious about installing it on my Vaio FE21M. I deleted the recover partition on my hard drive months ago and have made the System Recovery Disk using the Vaio tool provided with my laptop.

If I install Vista cleanly, as in completely formatting the harddrive and then installing the OS... will my recovery disk still work correctly and be able to reformat my laptop to Windows XP Media Centre Edition?


Thank you in advance, any help is greatly appreciated!

[Blencogo]

Hi jonathanbull and welcome to Club Vaio.

You should be able to completely restore your Vaio using the Recovery Discs.

I would check the discs are OK first by putting the System disc in the drive and re-booting. Check that the disc boots and starts the Recovery Utility - then remove the disc and exit.

Did you make an Application Recovery Disc as well?

[skykit84]

As long as you have the complete recovery CDs/DVDs then yes you will be able to recover the PC/Laptop back to the original spec with them.
Think of it as if your drive is corrupt... you would just recover using the CDs.... same way, if Vista is not for you, you can recover back to factory standard.

Do remember though that you will lose all information and will most likely have to do a "complete" C and D recovery or whatever they call it.
This will most likely put back your recovery partition too (and take its sweet time too!)

but end result is, yes you can. good luck!

[jonathanbull]

Thank you both very much for your replies... looks like I'll go for it!

One quick question, out of interest rather than nothing else. When I've restored my laptop before using my recovery disk I've never been asked for my serial - isn't this a little weird?

[Blencogo]

No - you will never be asked for a serial number when reinstalling. Your recovery software uses the generic OEM serial number for your Sony model - all owners of the same model will use the same serial number. Have a look at the key on your system - it will not match the number on the bottom of your Vaio.

The unique number on the bottom of your Vaio is not used during the installation - this is just your proof that you own a legal XP copy.

[herpof]

Please note that the S buttons will not work under Vista. And you will need to download the latest drivers for your nvidia card. The ones from the official site will not work. Try http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/.

And another thing. Why not try installing Vista in a third partition? If you can find a partitioning program, like Partition Magic, you could create another primary partition and install it there along with your xp. In my FE21M it worked perfectly, and I can now dual-boot either in xp or Vista.

Tell me if you have any questions.