How to Restore image to Sony Vaio E series SVE14A16FNS

highly appreciate advise.

The sonysys directory is designed to recover the sony back to its factory condition. It is not a standard partition, and as far as I know acronis recovery should just place an exact copy back from where it started. You do not say what versions of windows you are using, the other two partitions probably relate to that i.e the C drive.

Have you tried booting the laptop and entering the sony recovery facility (sony assist button on more modern vaios but could be f2 or f10 button I think). If you are lucky, you might be able to recover it that way.

You do not say what version of windows you are using. If Vista or XP, it is probably not really worth trying to recover them (or the Sonysys recovery partition).

In all honesty, you can buy a new W7 or W8 OS for as low as £50, and simply do a complete OS reinstall as you have probably lost all data for the last year anyway (unless you have backed up else where). You would obviously lose any "free applications" that came with the PC but most of these are can be replaced with same or similar from the web often at no cost.

If do you decide to reinstall the OS from scratch, then make sure you have a reasonably upto date version of acronis (recommend version 5551), and do a full disk backup immediately to an external drive (it will save time if you have go back to original version).

I also recommend that you actually do a full disk restore at this stage and check it is working properly (if it fails, worst case is you have to reinstall OS from scratch again). If the recovery doesn't work, you should contact Acronis or this forum for help).

No you start to reinstall apps and of course make a new backup (keeping original backup).

Hi Martin,

Thank you very much for responding to my post. appreciate much.

I am using windows 7 home premium 64x bit that cam pre installed.

i was able to recover the image backup that i took from acronis. how ever i continue to get "Bootmgr is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" error

when i insert Win 7 home premium disk and start and click on repair it discovers the windows (Recovered); when i click next i get the recovery screen where i can select the command prompt to manually repair it;

i have tried following combination of commands several time but still continue to get the same error.

x:> bootrec /FixMbr
x:> bootrec /fitboot
x:> bootrec /rebuildbcd

x:> bootsect /nt60 sys /mbr

i have also tried selecting the the partition from the
X: diskpart
x:> list disk

selected my only disk 0

list partition will list all the 3 partitions,

Sonysys
Recovery
unalloted (resumablely the c: drive)

selected 3 as primary and made it active.

restart and still the same error;

what i believe is while restoring the acronis image i have to rightly select / map the drives to logical or primary appropriately which is why it is not booting in the right order.

i have following partitions in the acronis image
viz Sonysys, Recovery and the unalloted actual physical disk space(650gb)

first i tried making sonysys as primary , recovery as logical and free disk as primary; than i tried to selected all primary while restoring still same error;

my last option is doing a clean install; but is there a way to restore my windows and fix this problem manually.

i think the third part boot fit software are not meant for branded PCs like Sony or anyother latest PCs; thats good for non-firmware based windows installations that are not engineered for specific H/s so using a third party s/w is not recommended;

Appreciate your feedback and guidance;

In all probability either the wrong partition has been marked as active or non ehave been marked as active upon restore.

I don't know which partition Sony uses as their active one, so I would suggest the following steps.

1. Download a free disk partition utility or purchase Disk Director 11 (the trial version will give you thei nfo you require, but then you will have to manually set the active flag using Microsoft DiskPart).

2. See if any partitions are marked as active. Different disk utility software will show this in a different way, but will often show the partition with an 'A'. If you know someone else who has the same model laptop as you, you can just run Windows Disk Management in Windows and that will tell you what is the active partition, and then you can compare with what your one says.

3. If you are unable to see what another Sony machine has as the active partition, you can try selecting each partition in turn, starting with the System partition.

The other possibilities as to why you are getting the error message is that the recovery has placed some sectors into different places on the disk and the Windows BCD cannot find the new location. There is a program called BootIT NG, this can be run from a USB flash stick or a CD and has a GUI based BCD editor.

If you don't have a Windows 7 emergency CD, I think these can be downloaded from Microsoft. Perhaps Sony also have a recovery ISO available for registered Sony users.

I forgot to mention, with laptops especially, make a complete disk image using the complete disk link rather than the one that shows the partitions available, this almost always stops the problem you are having from happening. To select complete disk, just click on the blue link that says 'Switch to Disk Mode', then instead of seeing drive letters and partitions, you will just see the manufacturers name of your disk.

Partition Mode

Disk Mode

I think you should simply try and do a clean install (keep all you backups separately), and then once that is done, just recover the backed up C drive if you can. The clean install has a good chance of correcting all the MBR issues. Then there is a fair chance the backed up C drive can be recovered then, but as it is a year old is ot worth the effort?