HDD failing on VPCEB2C5E

[Owenss]

My Vaio E series Vaio (VPCEB2C5E, PGC-71211M) keeps coming up with a message saying iminent hard drive failure.  I have checked the drive for viruses but found nothing. The current drive is a Toshiba MK5065GSX.

Looking at the windows drive manager it says the drive is Ok

Now my questions are as follows:

Do I have to replace the existing HDD with a like for like or can I fit a bigger size i.e. 750GB.

Will I be able to reload the recovery partition onto the new drive?

Will this cause a problem with the new drive having a larger bytes per sectors than the original?

Would I have to get a set of operating disks from sony to re install the software?

Will Windows come up with an error eg copied operating system?

I was going to use Acronis to image the old/newdrive?

Would the new drive require a new SID?

[Blencogo]

Hi Owenss - I must have missed your question.  Sorry.

If the Vaio is still working, you should be able to create your own Recovery Discs to reinstall all the OS and software onto the new drive.  Follow the instructions for "Create Recovery Media" in the Troubleshooting and Recovery Guide for your model which you can download here: -

http://download.sony-europe.com/pub/manuals/RecoTS/2010Q2_TRG_EN.pdf

The Recovery Discs are a 'sector by sector' copy of the recovery area on your existing hard drive.  This means that you can only reinstall the original OS and preinstalled software from these recovery discs onto a HDD with the same size sectors as the original hard drive.  The

MK5065GSX is formatted at 512 bytes per sector so you can only use the recovery discs on a new drive formatted with 512 bytes per sector - this probably limits you to a 500GB HDD.  Using the recovery discs installs a legal copy of Windows and also reloads the Recovery Partition onto the new drive so there should be no errors.

Your Vaio can use a larger Advanced Format Drive formatted at 4096 bytes per sector and a retail version of Windows can be installed normally.  It is only the Recovery Discs that do not recognise these AF Drives.

I honestly do not know if an Acronis mirror of your existing system can be installed onto a 4K AF drive.

[Owenss]

Hi Blencogo,

Thanks for the info. I managed to get a Toshiba MK5065GSX drive and used Acronis TI to make a mirror image.

Cheers

[janci321]

Hi blencogo.

This information is interesting for me.

I tried to clone original 500 GB HDD with some bad sectors to WD 750 GB. It works. But when I started recovery to factory setings it failed. There were error message (system cant instal system on hardware)

So I decided to do it another way.

I restore system on 500 GB HDD and made back up via Acronis. Than I put 750 GB HDD into pc and via Acronis and external HDD made a restore from back up. Everything was fine, system was working with all VAIO preinstalled software.

BUT ONLY WINDOWS UPDATE DIDNT WORK! Error message:

0x80070005

I tried everything, every advice on the intenet and youtube.

Then I found one article where was info that this is problem of sector size. There was a link to this:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp52001-52500/sp52144.exe

This software is from Intel Rapid storage and when I installed it, Win Update was OK. It solved problem with size of sector.

Now Im reinstaling windows again to 1 TB HDD and I made recovery from acronis back up again.

I installed program (link above), but Win Update is not working.

Can you give me some advice? Can you give me link for software to download that solve this problem?

Thank you very much for help from Slovakia.