Recovery problems with my FX501

[Estoman]

I have an elderly FX501 which has given good service to my daughter. She has now a new version and has kindly given her old one to her "old dad"! I thought that I could use it between work and home. It had a mass of files and a variety of software accumulated over the years and I thought I could use the original Recovery disks to take it back to its original state before updating software etc.. When I tried to use the disks I got a persistant occurence of a "Critical Error: Abort, Retry, Ignore or Fail" If I tried Ignore or Fail I got "stream reading error - restore process failed". I then tried changing the partitions with the same end result. I have also formatted the hard drive (C & D) using a Windows98 startup disk with the same failure. I have run Scandisk including surface scans which showed no problems or bad sectors. Could this be a problem with the CD drive or the Recovery set? If anyone could offer any ideas I would be most grateful.

Thanks for any help

Kevin

[Blencogo]

Not quite sure what to suggest Kevin.

The FX501 came with the original XP Home - was this one updated with SP2? If you look on VAIO-LINK you will see there are an awful lot of updates required following a reinstall!!

Anyway, I suppose the only useful suggestion is to copy the Recovery CDs on another computer and see if this helps with the readability. Was the CD Drive working OK before?

I'm sure you could buy a repacement CD set from Sony but that may cost £65 with no real guarantee of success.

Sorry I can't be much help here.

[Estoman]

Thanks for thoughts! As far as my daughter can remember the CD drive was working OK. I will give your idea a go though and see if it helps but then I guess I have to consider if this is worth any further expense.

Thanks again

Kevin

[Estoman]

I just had to let you know that it worked! I copied the recovery disks to new CD's and the re-installation worked! Many thanks again for your advice and support. Kevin :smileygrin:

[Blencogo]

Good news Kevin.

I expect you will have a bit of updating to do now!!!

Good Luck