VAIO Recovery Partition

[diesirae]

VAIO model PCV W510g - no mods to hardware. I had swapped out the power supply b/c it wasn't providing 5v and 12v.
My father gave me this PC b/c XP HE would not load and ran like a 486. I've fixed the primary issue but created another :rolleyes: Thinking that he had the recovery CDs for this thing, I installed my copy of XP pro to run stress test to be certain that only the power supply was bad.
Ultimate goal is to restore the pc to factory with its bundled software.
The hdd is supposed to have 80g. Only 31.5 is avalable. I know there is a recovery partition on the drive or was... I dont have access to VAIO's recovery wizard and the F10 option during boot up as prescribed my Sony has no response whatsoever.

I deleted what I appeared to be an available raw partition and formated to ntfs to install XP Pro.
Any chance in getting to that hidden recovery partition?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

If you have erased what seemed to be a raw partition and installed the XP over it, then the original recovery partition is gone.

The only way to rebuild it is to generate it anew (most likely you need an original CD set for the machine; or have a SONY service do it for you).

Basically to make it work again, you need to revert it into exactly the same state it was before. With a part of data most likely overwritten by XP install, this is just not possible with data recovery tools.