Replacing hard drive in Sony Vaio VPCEB14EN series Laptop

[hjoshi]

Hi,

Recently my laptop hard drive crashed and i want to replace the same with new one. Old HDD was of samsung 320GB and i want to replace the same with WD 500GB.
I had recovery discs with me.
But VAIO i heard that in VAIO laptop we cannot easily install new HDD.

Can anyone please guide on how to install new HDD, so that i can install original windows on the same as i had key for original windows which came with my laptop.
Also i want to prevent sony softwares as well which are factory setup in existing hard disk.

Request your help for the same.

Thanks,

 

[MightyMiroWD]

Hi there.

For the physical replacement I found these instructions in Sony knowledge base and I hope they could help you out:
https://docs.sony.com/release/989201342_VPCS1_series_HDD_CRU.pdf

As for the factory settings, on most of the laptops there is an hidden recovery partition (used to create recovery disks) which you can try to access it by pressing the F12 or F11 key (depending on the exact model) while booting your laptop and I think from there you can restore your laptop to factory settings.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

[Mark Phelps]

Also i want to prevent sony softwares as well which are factory setup in existing hard disk.

First of all, any Recovery partition is on the original drive, and since that has crashed, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to read it, let alone reuse the Recovery partition.

Second, if you order full restore recovery media from Sony, it is going to restore all the "bloatware" that came with the original setup -- that's how they work.

I recently put a new drive in an HP laptop -- but I was able to do that because I had done regular image backups using Macrium Reflect. So, I "restored" the new drive from the latest MR backup, swapped the old drive with the new one in the laptop, rebooted the laptop -- and all was good.

If you don't have an image backup (and you didn't say you did), you should be able to put the new drive in the laptop, boot from Win7 installation media, and simply install Win7. If the activation is contained in the BIOS (which would be my guess), it should simply reactivate and work without problems.

 

[gregrocker]

Everything needed is here to get and keep a perfect Clean Reinstall Windows 7.