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Accessing the recovery partition on Sony VAIO VGN-NR385E -use F10

Yet another Sony mystery. Undocumented in the included paperwork, as far as I can tell.

Oh yeah, if you want a recovery disk, you need to call in the first 30 days after purchase to get one free. After that, it’s voicemail hell to get to a live body, before you can send them more money for something they should have included in the box!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Windows, wtf!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to “Accessing the recovery partition on Sony VAIO VGN-NR385E -use F10”

  1. how to get the recovery for Sony Recovery Disks for VGN NR385E.

  2. I regret having bought my laptop from sony.They have given only one big partition other than the hidden recovery partition.I have no clues regarding how to partition it further.And they warn if anything is altered, the recovery CD’s would become meaningless and won’t work. It seems i have to live with only one working partition of 180GB. Any help would be really nice. Thanks.

  3. For Windows, I generally use Partition Magic, mostly because I own it & have been using it for a long time. In Linux GParted is my favorite. But, there are bunch of other free (ie open source) & commercial apps that can do partitioning.

    If you can give me an idea of what you want/need to do with other partitions maybe I can be more specific with advice.

  4. hi,thanks for ur reply.
    Actually, my sony vaio has only one partition plus one hidden ‘recovery’ partition. I’d want to keep my system and data partitions separate and if i later restore my system back to original, data partition should remain intact. I can resize/make new partitions, but the problem is that in that case, sony recovery partition, or for that matter, sony recovery disks become unusable. At least this is what Sony advises to their laptop users.That’s why i’m confused.Thanks for ur help.

  5. Vickey,

    I’m not positive it applies to your model, but as I recall, the last couple of Sony restore disks I had the misfortune of using wiped out the existing partitions on the drive, then recreated the factory install, so everything was lost.

    I usually carry around a Linux Live CD, like Puppy or DSL, that I can boot from and copy the important stuff to a network drive or external USB drive. Puppy/DSL can read & write to FAT16/32, NTFS, CD, & DVD drives so the odds are pretty good I can read from & write to just about anything that’s available. This would be annoying to do on a daily basis tho & is really only practical for data recovery.

    If you really want to separate the data onto its’ own partition, I’d suggest a couple different options:

    1. Get an external USB drive or create a shared folder on a network you have access to and then buy a copy of SyncBackSE for US$30.00. Download a 30 day trial of SyncBackSE here. There’s also a freeware version that does essentially the same thing as the paid, but the free version is more irritating (to me) to get setup. $30 isn’t a bad deal for the time saved. Freeware version of SyncBack download.

      Setup SyncBack to backup on a schedule that makes sense for you – once a day or more if you’re writing a lot to your data partition.

    2. Sign up for offsite backup at Mozy. 2GB Totally Free Online Backup! Compliments of Mozy or Mozy Unlimited Backup – $4.95/Month. You can do scheduled backups with Mozy also. Of course, you have to have an internet connection for this to work.
    3. Do both, especially if you travel with your laptop and don’t always have access to a network share or a USB drive. I have clients who travel doing both and it works well.

      4. If you have to use the recovery disks, you’ll only have to recreate the data partition and restore your data from backup.

    4. Use Norton/Symantec Ghost to make an image of your disk once you’ve got it partitioned the way you want it & forget about the Sony recovery disks. Then use SyncBack, Mozy or both to backup your data partition. Restore from the Ghost image, restore data from backup & you’re in good shape.

    There are probably 10 (or a hundred) other ways to deal with this. You might want to check with a geek who’s familiar with what you do with your laptop for his/her opinion. This is kinda tough to analyse & make specific recommendations in this format. Or email me (above) & I’ll give it a go.

    Eric

  6. hi Eric, thanks for all those tips.Sure, i’d try these, and let you know by email if i’m stuck somewhere. Yet i was wondering why in the first place, Sony would not allow flexibility of making more partitions easily without making things that complex and rendering the recovery partition/disks useless.

    .vickey

  7. I doubt we’ll ever know the real answer. My guess would be that forcing you to accept their configuration saves them tons of money in support calls. Any customization you do, software you install, etc is at your own risk and if something breaks, then it’s up to you to find out why & fix it. Even the lowest level support person can sell you a recovery DVD & tell you how it put it in the drive. None of the manufacturers I’ve dealt with in the last 10 (or more) years offers anything much different, unless you’re paying for the support contract.

    In their defense, the margins are so thin and competition so fierce on computers that providing any support at all really eats into the profit margin. I think that’s the real reason…

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  9. Listen to Erics advice find a geek you know/trust to look at this for you as on public forums you will get 100’s of pieces of good advice. That ultimately will confuse and possibly harm your system and mental health. :D

    Personally I use a boot disc packed with tools for just about everything. At the moment I have a Sony Vaio in my care with a borked HDD (funnily enough it looks like the recovery partition segment of the drive, depending where on the drive this is stored, 170(and rising) bad/recovered sectors on the first 3 gig of the drive). Luckily I have a HDD regeneration tool which is taking care of things for me.

  10. Hi. Your site displays incorrectly in Mozilla, but content excellent! Thanks for your wise words:)

  11. I just discovered the recovery partition on my VGN-TZ250N thanks to a tech guy at a Fry’s story. Something screwed up the operating system on my pc in January and destroyed all printing capability as well as causing windows to no longer validate the os software

    After backing up all files and saving my Sprint wireless settings, the restore function completely restored the operating system to its original condition.

    The bonus was that none of the Sony bloatware crap was included so I actually have a cleaner system than before. I was able to reinstall my Office 2007 Professional without having to remove the small business version that was factory installed.

    Also, I got a clean IE install instead of the factory version with the AOL toolbar which couldn’t be removed.

    Much nicer. I only wish that I’d known about this before.

  12. Hi,

    i have sony notebook, wich doesn’t contain hidden partition..it has only 2 ntfs partitions, but no hidden one??..i used linux live cd’s and i dont see any hidden partitions…can i use recovery cd from other laptops??

    thx in advance for ur help

  13. Usually, recovery cd’s are manufacturer and model specific so the short answer is probably not. Even if you did find a cd that worked, chances are very good that you’d be missing the drivers for your model, not to mention licensing problems.

    I’d start at Sony’s support page and look for your exact model or series to see what’s available directly from Sony. If you can’t find any info at Sony then Google for your model/series and see if anyone else has had a similar problem and what they did about it.

    Good luck!

  14. When using a Sony Recovery CD, no matter how many partitions you’ve created/edited, if you choose to do a full restore (back to the factory install), then you’re going to end up with the same thing you had when you bought the computer. It will remove all partitions, except for the one it’s running in (the Recovery/Hidden Partition). Next, it will recreate the old partition. Finally, the partition is formatted, new files are copied, etc. When it boots up, you’re back in Windows.

    (Source: I’ve worked on a lot of them and they all work the same.)

  15. This is also the case when using the Recover Partition, as opposed to the Recovery CD’s…

  16. I contacted Sony support and the recovery DVDs cost 43 Euro…thats a lot of money..

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