Vaio VPCEH system recovery & system repair discs not working

When I first got this Vaio I made the recovery & repair discs... unfortunately I made them on DVD-RW and apparently they are not compatible (don't work) I also did a system image on my external hard drive... and again does not work. I no longer have the recovery partition available so ya there's that issue & if none of this is enough... I have unsuccessfully attempted to obtain the oem software for the last 4yrs, cannot get it through Best Buy they sent me to Sony who referred me back to Best Buy I went online & attempted to find and download everything that comes preloaded in this Vaio, within a year & half my Vaio completely crashed and had to have the os reinstalled.. and one by one everything else installed. Now, I attempted to download the ISO off Microsoft and entered my product key only to have the oops that was purchased preinstalled & you need to contact Sony game.. Still cannot obtain the factory media and my vaio is about to die yet again. I'm wondering if the reason my recovery discs don't work is the dvd-rw or if its because the files are missing ?? Is there anyway to borrow someone's factory recovery media? Does anyone know how to maybe find or recover the recovery partition? Help?????

socaligirl333 said:

... I went online & attempted to find and download everything that comes preloaded in this Vaio, within a year & half my Vaio completely crashed and had to have the os reinstalled

Depending on how the operating system was reinstalled it's possible that the hard drive was formatted and the factory recovery partition was erased. Or perhaps it no longer has a drive letter assigned to it. It would help to see your current disk management.

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image - Windows 7 Help Forums

I did a Google search for "Sony Vaio VPCEH Recovery Disks". I found a company offering full factory restore solutions. Since this company sells the factory restore disks I can't post a link to it because the Forum doesn't allow advertising.

It would also help to know how you did the system image. Did you use the built-in Windows imaging tool or did you use a 3rd party software like Macrium Reflect? Hopefully others will join in with some additional suggestions.

Have you changed the hard drive? Some sony Vaio's won't accept recovery disks unless the new hard drive is

a) Exactly the same size as the old one (eg 320GB)
b) They won't work on Advanced Format drives so the drive needs to be sata I or sata II

I had a very similar problem a year or so ago when my drive failed. I could do a clean install, but then the laptop overheated massively. In the end I bought a Sata II drive the same size as the old one and the recovery disks worked And no overheating.

Sony's have some firmware that is a pain.

One more thought. Your System Image. A couple of easy mistakes to make trying to install from it. The System Image needs to be names WindowsImageBackup. If you've called it anything else then rename it to WindowsImageBackup. Also (I've done this!) you need to install the Windows repair disc as well as the external hard drive. The Windows repair disk will ask if you want to reimage from a system image and it will look for one when you select that. If it isn't called WindowsImageBackup it won't find it.

I once couldn't understand why my Image wouldn't install and it's because I had just plugged the external hard drive in and not used the recovery/repair disk as well.

The recovery/repair disk is not the same as the recovery disks for the OS. If you don;t have a repair/recovery disk you can use a Windows 7 installation disk (burn the ISO for Windows 7). It will also have the repair option and ask if you want to install an image.