Recovery Discs

[aidan_strachan]

I have jusy fitted a Seagate 750g hard drive into my vaiao VGN NW20SF because the previous HD was corrupted, The recovery disc I created wont load because the new HD is to new and I need a newer version of windows 7. I have installed a newer version from a freinds copy with my windows 7 product key. If I now use my original recovery discs will it Re-install my Vaio  Software or will it try to overwrite my newer version of windows 7?

[Blencogo · Accepted solution]

Hi aidan_strachan and welcome to the Sony Users Community.

Unfortunately, the Recovery Discs are not compatible with the newer Advanced Format hard drives. You cannot use the Recovery Discs unless the drive is formatted with 512KB Sectors - the newer AF Hard Drives are formatted with 4096KB Sectors to allow for more capacity in the same size drive.

I don't think there is a way to recover the pre-installed software onto this HDD. It may be possible to reinstall onto a standard format hard drive and then make a Mirror Image which may then install onto the Advanced Format drive but it may not work.

I suppose you have 2 choices - change the drive for a 512KB format drive (probably the maximum will be 500GB) or lose all the Preinstalled Software.

Sorry for the bad news!