Sony Vaio laptop with Windows 7 Home will not load Windows; automatically goes into startup repair then fails. Unfortunately, there are no restore points and the owner did not create the recovery disks when they purchased the laptop. I have tried the typical things to repair without success; F8 startup options fail (no recovery option available), startup repair fails, repair CD made from a good system fails, booted to another Windows 7 disk fails because its not the same version, CHKDSK, SFC scan, etc.
From a command prompt I can see the recovery partition and it appears to be intact. Is there a way to create the system recovery disks from the recovery partition when Windows will not load?
This unit was purchased at Walmart. The model number is PCG-61611L. Sony's site requires an additional model number to access info. This number is not located on the outside of laptop. Sony indicates there is a text file within Windows which contains this number. Thus far, have not been able to find the file.
F10 and F11 during boot did not work. It appeared F10 tried but all that happened was a row of multi colored pixels across the screen and it froze there.
Saw another post about using gParted to access the drive and change the recovery partition to /boot. Did that and it went farther than before. If successful I will post all the details in case someone else runs into this.
Edit:
Found the recovery partition needs to be hidden in order for F10 to work. All that happens when F10 is pressed at startup is it comes to a DOS style boot configuration screen. There are no options for recovery. F11 does nothing. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion the recovery partition may look intact when in actuality it is not functional. The owner will have to purchase recovery disk(s) from Sony since they did not make the recovery disks when prompted.
Best Answer
You should be able to initiate a boot to the repair partition without creating the recovery disks. Normally, you must have access to the OS to actually create these disks.
Sony's usually use the F10 key to access this recovery partition. Pressing F10 while the system is loading (just like F8 for the Windows boot options menu) should open whatever recovery system Sony installed on the laptop.
If F10 doesn't work, post the full model number of the laptop so we can look up the specific instructions for that model.