Sony Vaio Laptop Question

Lee Chasse wrote:

After doing what I considered a full back-up of my laptop drive which of course is C:

"of course"? Of course not. C: alone is definitely not a full backup, and frequently would not even be bootable. On Windows 7 and 8 the bootable partition is often a hidden partition other than C:. For safety, and for simplest most likely ability to do a good restore, do a full disk backup selecting the entire disk.

Go into Windows Disk Management to see the layout of your disk and to see where it boots.

The Recovery partition is useful only to restore the PC to its original factory state. Once you begin installing software and using the computer, such a restore is much less useful and much less appealing.

I removed my Dell Recovery partition and thus freed up almost 20 GB of disk space. But, first I used Dell's backup utility to create the Recovery image to a USB flash drive (you could also choose three DVD-R disks), which could be used restore to Dell factory state if I ever sold the PC. I also moved boot files from Recovery partition to the OS partition.

But, with ATI, the Recovery disks aren't even necessary if you use ATI to create a pre-boot backup image. I also did that (belt and suspenders).

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?

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.