FW21l Disk Crash and loss of Drivers...

[Kimpers]

I have an FW21L (still with 6 months warranty) and it works perfectly. ...at least that was the case until I had a disk crash. Now I cannot reload the drivers because I have lost the driver partition (disk is dead). If I buy a new disk, can I rebuild this partition? (luckily I created backup DVDs).

[tonybeard]

Welcome to the club,

Sure that should work as the bios will sort out the validation aspects

[Kimpers]

Hi Tony

thanks for the reply.

...would I be able to format the new hard disk hidden partition? ....I assume that I would need to format it (hidden partition) in order to restore from DVDs?

Steve

[tonybeard]

I would say the factory would install the hidden partition and the recovery disks would be a secondary non hidden partition replacing process. I can't muster the hidden partition after using recovery disks but please check for other advice as it may be my AR model saving space

[Kimpers]

Hi Tony

...I have tried to research (a little bit) about the hidden partition. Does the VAIO FW21L make use of the PHDisk utility to create a (the) hidden partition for restoration of the VISTA drivers and utilities? From what I have read (?) this hidden partition would be (might be) essential to migrate from VISTA to Windows 7 ...as it provides keyboard key functionality

Has anybody else managed to fathom-out how to create hidden partitions that actually work with their FW21L restoration DVDs?

Steve