VAIO SVE14A27CHX Win8 HD Failed and no Recovery Disk

Fellow users,

I have a big problem, my hard drive failed and I have no recovery disks with me.

It came pre-loaded with Sony's OEM Win 8.0 and several partitions. I tried to recover the system, but my HD has too many bad blocks and it ends up freezing.

So I bought a new HD and placed it into my laptop. Using a Linux Boot-CD and a SATA-USB adaptor, I was able to access several partitions on my old HD. I used GParted to copy and paste the SONYSYS, Recovery, Windows RE Tools, Disk-1 and Disk-2 partitions to my new HD, but not my OEM partition.

I tried to boot the computer this way, but it did not boot, said that my system needed repair and that I should boot with a recovery disk.

I have created a USB Boot Disk on another Win8 computer (lenovo), but I did not copy the recovery partition (for obvious reasons). Now I am able to boot to the recovery tools, but when I click to Restore the system, it says it cannot locate needed partitions.

After that, I also tried to recover from a System Image and guide it to my Install.wim file, but it said that it did not contain info on my syste,

I spent the last day looking at threads here about DISKPART, but I cannot manage to make it work. I am not that advanced and I feel like I am shooting in the dark here.

So, with my recovery partition in hands, how can I recover my system (factory settings of course) in my new HD?

Thanks in advance.

On many Sony models, holding alt + F10 at boot will start the factory restore process although in your case factory restore may not work coming from another computer.
You may have to order the recovery discs from Sony.

Hi

If you are able to successfully copy the entire contents of 15 - 20 GB sized "Recovery" partition, you can try genet's mini guide to recover factory image from "Install.wim" or Install.swm".

http://www.eightforums.com/installa...reinstalling-windonws-8-usb-2.html#post368623