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fdorfberg

VGN FE41Z windows Vista

Original HDD was 200gb Toshiba. Needed more space so replaced with 500gb Seagate which worked ok until it recently started gettin bad sectors and failed. Now I have bought a 1 TB Toshiba MK1059GSM. When running the recovery dvds it goes thru the process of creating partitions, copying files etc but eventually says that it can't install on this computers hardware. The only hardware that is different from the originally purchased spec is the HDD. I then tried installing Windows 7 and that worked ok. I retried the recovery process to reinstall Vista but it got to the same stage and gave me the same message. Do I need some drivers or something for Vista to access the HDD?

Any help to get this working would be appreciated.

Thanks

FD

Message was edited by: fdorfberg

fdorfberg

Hi all,

Just to update you about this I eventually managed to borrow a "non-AFD" 500gb hdd from another machine and proceeded as follows:

Dug out my Original Recovery DVDs which I created after the original purchase of this Laptop.

Used these to reinstall Vista and all original software back to original settings.

Before allowing the machine to go online used a usb drive to install latest Microsoft Security Essentials and the latest definition updates.

Then went online and updated Vista with all available updates including SP1, SP2 etc.

When fully updated, removed the 500gb hdd and fitted the 1TB hdd into the VAIO.

Connected the 500gb hdd via USB and used ghost to clone the Vista partition onto the 1TB hdd using the command "ghost32 -align=1mb"

This procedure worked and now my VAIO is working and allowing updates etc with no problems.

Hope this helps others with similar situations.

FD

View solution in original post

Blencogo

Hi fdorfberg and welcome.

I suspect that your new drive is an "Advanced Format" hard drive. Advanced Format drives use a larger sector size in order to increase capacity and rather than the usual 512 byte sectors, Advance Format drives use sectors of 4096 bytes.

However, Windows has been historically configured and optimised to operate with 512 byte sectors. Support for Advanced Format drives only came with Vista SP1 but because your Vista Recovery Discs are pre-SP1 they cannot recognise the advanced formatting. This explains why you can install Windows 7 as it supports Advanced Format drives.

Try Google to see if a solution exists. Perhaps someone else here may have some experiences to share?

fdorfberg

Hi Blencogo,

Thanks for your prompt assistance with this issue. Would you happen to know of any way to integrate sp1 and sp2 into the recovery dvds so that the os can then be installed in a reasonably up to date state so that I can use the new HDD.

In the meantime I tried restoring a relatively recent image (which was Vista SP2) onto the new hdd but it would not boot. Still trying to figure out what went wrong with that.

Will try and search for more info regarding advanced format drives and older os.

Best regards

FD

Blencogo

Hi FD,

The problem seems to be a mis-alignment of the sectors on the disc. With Vista SP1+ and Windows 7, the primary partition starts at Sector 1M (sector 1,048,576) where on older systems the primary partition starts at Sector 63 and uses a DOS format. This may not leave enough room for the boot code.

Toshiba, who make your hard drive, have a support page with good FAQs and offer a Paragon Alignment Tool utility which is downloadable free of charge. Have a look at these links: -

http://storage.toshiba.eu/cms/en/support_services/advanced_format.html

http://storage.toshiba.eu/export/sites/toshiba-sdd/media/downloads/advanced_format/4KWhitePaper_TEG....

I don't know too much about it but I doubt if the Recovery Discs can be used as I don't think the recovery software is AFD aware. You may have to install the OS onto a 'normal' hard drive, then make an image and transfer this to the new drive.

Let us know how you get on because other users here are going to have a similar problem at some time.

LASERman71

Toshiba tool is intended to gain full preformance from AF Hard Drives on working systems and NOT to cure this instalation compatibility problem.

As Sony Recovery Discs are using Imaging Software to recover OS (and it seams this software is not compatible with AF) there is no way of using Recovery Discs with new AF HDD's because you can't add new drivers or integrate Service Pack to OEM Recovery Discs.

We are laptop repair company and have this issue not only with Sony laptops.

So far at the moment I see there only two options:

A- use older type of HDD w/o Advanced Format

B- install Windows from ordinary Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 Install disc (if it's not Windows 7 Service Pack 1 use Method 1 from this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2466753). After succesfull instalation download and install drivers from Support section of this Sony website (You'll miss Sony built-in audio-video Software package avaliable only on Recovery Discs)

Good Luck!

fdorfberg