Image Restoration Problems / Sony Laptop

[Over Carl]

Triued putting win 7 on my mum's lappy but got caught out by the fact you can't just use an oem dvd and use the code on the coa of original pc.

Was no problem as I had imaged the drive first using acronis.

However, when I restored the image it went wrong. If I just normally restored it, I booted into the diagnostic/recovery partition but only got options for diags, no recovery, had no way of booting into vista.

If I restore it, then restore the main partition again as active, or if I restore everything except the diag partition, I get a windows boot manager screen saying it couldn't find \windows\system32\winload.exe status 0xc0000225

Problem is I haven't got any vista home premium x86 media and a mate lost my recovery dvds. Anyone know any nice easy ways of getting this back in action?

Laptop is a vgn-fw21l

[evilsatan]

When you say OEM DVD do you mean a manufacturer supplied disc mate? Or a retail disc bought from a shop?

An OEM disc should be preactivated by the SLIC table in your BIOS so no need to input a COA licence. If you have been trying to use a retail disc then send me a PM and I will try source you an appropriate OEM CD. I used to work alongside the Sony warranty engineers and they often sent out Sony OS discs, don't you have any recovery discs?

[Over Carl]

I did have recovery discs for vista but lent them to a mate who lost them.

The oem copy I used was a dell one- with xp I've put dell oem on loads of other pc's and just used the serial from coa of a legit dell, didn't realise this trick wouldn't work.

Other problem is this laptop only has slic 2.0 bios - even though they aren't that old - some are covered by sony's win 7 update program. The bios image is packed in an exe I can't decompile, wanted to enable auditing on every folder of my pc to try and find where it temporarily puts it and I messed up all the permissions on my win 7 build on my pc now as well!

[evilsatan]

Problem is sony oem discs are hard to find for free, if I still worked at my old workplace I could have got you any discs for free.

Have you read through this forum? From the sounds of it you would rather a SLIC hack to have Windows 7, well there are a lot of pre-hacked BIOS here and you can request too:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thr...quests-section

[Over Carl]

Yeah, I know, that's why I didn't even bother asking! I tried some other sony recovery dvd's and it would crash error 7b and I have no option to change anything in my bios.

Many thanks for that link but someone's already requested a bios for mine and noone bothered. If/when I get round to sorting these problems I keep making for myself, then I may try again and make my own.

[evilsatan]

Yeah, I know, that's why I didn't even bother asking! I tried some other sony recovery dvd's and it would crash error 7b and I have no option to change anything in my bios.

Many thanks for that link but someone's already requested a bios for mine and noone bothered. If/when I get round to sorting these problems I keep making for myself, then I may try again and make my own.

7b BSOD is usually caused by the SATA controller. For Vista/Windows 7 the contoller mode should be AHCI, for XP it should be Compatibility. Does the BIOS not have that option in the advanced section?