Sony Vaio Laptop Question
After doing what I considered a full back-up of my laptop drive which of course is C:
When I attempt a recovery (full backup) I see the following there
Basic GPT 678.9 GB NTFS
Sonysys FAT 32
Recovery NTFS 19.12GB
FAT 32 260 mb
Are all of those on my basic C: drive and necessary as something from Sony ??
Any help appreciated.
I don't do differential or any other backups - just FULL
Lee
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Lee,
Off at a tangent here, but have you tested your recovery CD/USB environment in booting the Vaio? This is very important, as there have been some problems with the recovery environment being able to boot some models of Sony PCs, and you need to find out now, before you have the hassle of restoring an image for real.
What model is your Sony?
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Hi,
All comments below are based on my Sony Vaio experiences (fairly new 2012/2013 model with Sony Assist button).
I strongly recommend you keep the Sony Recovery Partitition (and also make a bootable backup on a 32 GB USB stick).
The Sony Recovery system seems to be very robust, and I had to use it several times whilst testing various backup packages. In worst case scenario, this at least gets your PC back to its start position (takes about 2 hrs though).
I also strongly recommend you make use the Win PE4 recovery disk based on version 5551 (later version has bugs with handling GPT disks).
You will need plus pack as well to do this. You can use later version 6514 as well, but you have to overwrite trueimage.exe from the earlier version anyway. I woul just uninstall 6514, and install 5551 (download from web).
The Win PE4 recovery disk has a better set of preinstalled drivers than the basic Linux disk, which I found to be unreliable. I also recommend you create a bootable USB and copy all files from DVD - the usb is much faster on startup.
With version 5551 there is a patch that is supposed to allow you to boot the recovery disks in EUFI mode, but I could never get it to work. No matter how I tried to configure things, I could only ever boot in legacy mode from acronis disks. THis is not a generic problem, as I have used a Windows recovery disk that boots into EUFI mode.
So to do a backup, you have to press the Sony assist button as you startup, change to legacy mode, closedown and restart (with boot disk/usb) in place, and trueimage then starts.
Do two backups - a full disk and a C partition only (they may be much the same size).
If you need to recover, try the full disk backup which would be fairly quick depending on how much you backup. You will need to put PC back to UEFI mode to test/use the recovery.
Now and this is crucial, if the full disk backup fails, you can get the PC back to its original state, and then just do a C partition recovery. This is quite a robust but slow method but does assume you have not made any major changes to the hardware that could affect the hidden partitions (simple changes e.g adding memory etc does not seem to affect anything). Note: You could also backup the C partition using another backup package - avoids "common mode" failures if you only use one package.
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