Sony puts on a 5 gig restore partition on the beginning of your hard drive from which you can use to wipe out your system and do a fresh factory install of your computer. From the bios boot screen, press F10. This will boot the vaio recovery partition and let you freshly install. On my computer, this partition would not boot correctly, complaining of a missing file.
To reinstall windows yourself with your own windows cd, you will need the hardware drivers to run the basic functions of the computer, and your extra software which you paid for to use your built-in digital camera and extra features of the laptop. Unfortunately, the sony support site is missing the crucial video and sound drivers, as well as any of the bundled software. The machine uses the Intel 855GM chipset drivers, but the intel driver is not recognised.
So where are these drivers and extra software? You need to use your Vaio Recovery Media Kit. You don't have this? Well sony doesn't ship these. You paid for the software, but you don't get any media with it. Instead, that 5 gig restore partition on the disk can create the recovery media (9 cds or 2 dvds). You cannot do this after re-installing or a crash, but have to do it with with your factory windows install.
From the start bar, there is a sony recovery media kit creator program to create your cd set. I
only tried making one set, and CD 1 was not burned properly. The recovery program is on CD 1.
I called up sony and had them ship me a recovery dvd set. Yes, they have all the dvds you need,
they just don't give you them when you buy your $3,200 laptop.
When I tried restoring the drivers and other software off the dvd set, I find out that I need to insert Disc 7
to continue. With only 2 DVDs, I tried both, but neither is accepted as disc 7. I had disc 7 from my
cd set I made, and that isn't accepted either. The OK button on the dialog box doesn't even do anything
when you select it. It doesn't read the hard drive, dvd player, or anything. It is completely broken, and the recovery
software is useless.
So how did I get the drivers and software? The cd and dvd set is boot-able, so I tried booting the dvd set
to do the software custom re-install.
For some unknown reason, the "Application Recovery" option is grayed out, making a selective restore of the drivers and software impossible from the boot-able cds and dvds.
Searching through the cds and dvds, there is a file called SONY1P_0334217.PAC on dvd1 and on cd6. This is some kind of archive format used by sony. It can be extracted with the program kcap.exe. Run it with "kcap source\SONY1P_0334217.PAC destination\" and it will pop up a window, exit, and extract the files in the background. This will extract 34 or so directories with directory names such as "0329501.SNC". Inside most of the directories is a "setup.ini" file, which you can read with notepad. It will have a field called "AppName" which will tell you what software this is. From here you can now find the software to run the hotkeys of the laptop, Network Smart Capture for the camera, various libraries needed for the software, and a drivers directory with all the drivers for the laptop.
If you have reached this far and you don't have the recovery cd or dvd set, you can get the file SONY1P_0334217.PAC from your 5 gig recovery partition. The recovery partition is marked as type 12 (Compaq diagnostics) and windows won't mount it as your E: drive. But this is a regular ntfs windows partition and can be accessed by just changing the partition type back to type 7 (ntfs). I did this using a linux boot disk and running fdisk. Be sure not to mark this first 5 gig partition as boot-able, or it will try to boot the recovery partition, the same as hitting F10 on startup. If you hit F10 on startup, it may mark the partition as boot-able, so you may need to run fdisk and unmark it as well to boot windows again.
After running fdisk, you should see the E: drive now with the file SONY1P_0334217.PAC ready to be extracted. The E:
drive will have a icon with the recovery screw driver. You may need to right click and select explore, or else it may
autorun the drive and run the software restore program which doesn't work here either.
Other software is on dvd1 and cd6, cd7, cd8, and cd9 as .EXE files that you can run and install. The dvd player and some of the trial software is like this.
I had a few drivers show up as ? in the device manager and I needed to add those by hand from the drivers directory that was extracted, but I don't remember which ones they where and I think they where all obvious what to do.
2004-10-08 Adam F. Rogoyski (rogoyski at math.utexas.edu)