The reason why i wanted to use the preinstalled recovery partition is that i would not have to download and install drivers. The recovery partition was initially 'hidden' i went to 'unhide' it using diskpart and subsequently copied the entire partition to a bootable usb stick. Its the Sony's recovery that i experience an endless loop. I have done the same for my desktop computer to install windows 7. But i would love to have it on a USB stick instead of it on DVDs. I have burned the recovery partition into 'recovery discs' as per the technical support's suggestion, it works. It promptly restarts and boots from the USB drive again, an endless loop. I have done so, but when booting from the USB drive, it loads up the recovery console, which allows me to select if i would like to do a system recovery (back to factory settings) after selecting a full system recovery. Is it possible to copy my sony vaio Z recovery partition into a bootable usb drive? ZoinksS2k mentioned I should be 'sure to set the partition to Active and run bootsect to make it bootable.' which is going to be my next step after I've read up a little again on this.Īnyway I hope this help anyone in the same predicament.ĭoes anyone else have a better solution/experience of doing something similar? Cheers.ĮDIT: Sorry posted this is the wrong forum, can someone delete or move it for me. Seems the next trick is to find a way of creating a bootable USB stick (again there's plenty of info out there concerned with installing Win 7) and then writing the ISO (or contents of?) it to it and filing it away for safe keeping. Vaio Rocovery created a single ISO 5,344,117KB in size. I setup a DVD+R DL drive and everything went smothly. I'm happy to report that this has the capability to create a fake drive with various fake media discs and does indeed fool the Vaio software into creating an ISO to the internal hard drive. After trying a couple of virtual CD/DVD/BD-ROM/HD-DVD tools I took the advice of TofuTurkey (cheers fella) in the vaio owners thread and tried Virtual CD. The main issue (i think) is with Vaio Recovery Center itself, if you try to create the recovery disk the software will complain that no dvd writer can be found. I know that it's probably gonna be simpler to just create a bootable USB key/stick and copy the relevant drivers to it and use that (something I'll be doing to get rid of all the crapware sony have preinstalled) but I like having the security of an additional backup solution just in case I royally balls it up. Installing Win 7 from a USB stick is fairly well documented on the web but the problem above isn't, certainly not for the VPC Z anyway. I finally got my VPC Z with HDD/no DVD today and I thought I'd start up a thread on the subject for those like me who once receiving their Z will be trying to use Vaio Recovery Center to create recovery disks without using a DVD Writer.

Burn sony vaio recovery disk