Recovery Disk problem - VGC -V2S

[YahtzeeLad]

Hi, I am trying to perform a recovery of my VGC-V2S from the two sets of recovery disks (DVD-R) I created. I have used the disks successfully before. I have no recovery partition as I deleted it after creating the disks.

Both sets of disks are not being seen by the dvd drive. I have tried to boot from them having pressed F5 and then F10 in the BIOS, but it ignores them. I cannot see any of the files on the disks in explorer but if I put them in another PC it can see all the files and the disk icon is the Recovery Utility icon.

Has anyone else seen this problem and found a solution to it?

Cheers

[Thalamus.]

Hi Manners,

if you place another DVD disc in your vaio are you able to view files on that DVD.?

[YahtzeeLad]

Yes - drive seems to work in every other way. Did a bit of googling and there was talk of the BIOS not recognising this as a Vaio and not allowing me to use the disks for a clean install. I checked the Vaio-Link BIOS update and it wouldn't update as it said I was running the latest BIOS.

I am wondering if there is some serial number / authenticity switch that's been inadvertently turned off. However, the system info shows all the OEM, hardware serial number and OS serial number.

I was half thinking of wiping the HDD and seeing if the disks work, but am worried that I'll end up with a beautiful brick. I only want to do a recovery as the PC is so bogged down and slow, but I would prefer as is over nothing at all!

Any bright ideas will be gratefully received.

[YahtzeeLad]

I got the following response from Sony Support:

*********************************************

Thank you for contacting us.

It appears, your Vaio needs to be collected for repair, please phone your local support centre on 0870 240 2408 (in warranty) or 0905 031 0006 (out of warranty) and an agent will be more than happy to assist you further. We look forward to your response.

Regards,

Justin
Sony Vaio-Link Team

*********************************************

I can't believe this is a collect and repair issue, as apart from being slow and hanging between applications / web navigation, the machine works fine.

[YahtzeeLad]

I have this sorted - thought I would post the solution as I didn't have any luck googling and someone might find this useful.

It was, ahem, a dirty lens. I hadn't considered this as the drive was seeing all disks except the recovery disks, but after a clean install of XP from a CD the problem was still there.

So now I have reinstalled from the recovery disks and have 2GB memory on the way from Crucial, so hopefully I'll get another couple of years out of it.

[Thalamus.]

Excellent - thanks for the update manners..