naeo

In his post, he said that he had the Vista Ultimate DVD, that can be used as Vista Recovery too. In fact Vista Recovery Disc is a lite version of Vista DVD.

As a matter of fact, a few hours ago when I read this post, I was looking for solutions to this problem too. Much to my frustration, it turned out to be very simple when it works. I know it's a month old thread but hope that my post will help other that experience this problem in the future.

Actually the mbr on c: has nothing to do with that or it has something to do in some kind of ways, i'm not sure. However, the important thing to know is that the hidden partition do a back-up itself everytime the 'bcd' file where mbr info is contained, is overwritten.

Vaio laptop, like every other laptops that have a hidden partition. This partition itself has an OS to run the Recovery. When C: is installed by another OS (Linux, XP,...) the mbr info is overwritten in every partition that is bootable. This applies to the hidden partition too. That is why you cannot launch the Recovery by pressing Alt F10 or F10 (depending on laptop brand).

To fix this you need a Vista Recovery CD or the Windows Vista DVD itself to launch Vista Computer Repair Service.

In Windows Vista setup first or second windows (depending if you have to choose the language and keyboard type), click Repair Computer in low left corner. It might not list the partition that you wish to repair. Even if it is listed there, you cannot fix it just by repair its boot information from the CD/DVD.

Click Cancel to go back to Vista Recovery wizard where you have many options to repair your computer or restore the system point.

Open the CommandPrompt there.

From the CommandPrompt window, you need to go to that hidden partition. If you know its drive letter, great! Otherwise, just try one by one till you reach there. If it is not there, you can use diskpart to make it available. For command syntax with diskpart http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc766465.aspx

From this partition, use CD command line to get into hidden directory boot. Type dir /a:h to display the file 'bcd' inside this boot folder. You will also see in this directory the backup files of bcd. I don't remember how many times did I mess it up but I saw 4 backup files there. What you do is to restore the original 'bcd' file (usually the oldest backup).

Use the attrib command to remove read-only and system attributes from both backup and current bcd files (type attrib /? if you forget/don't know how). Then use copy command to copy the backup file to the current bcd (type copy /? if you forget/don't know how). You will be asked if you wanted to overwrite the file, type Y then Enter to confirm.

Exit CommandPrompt and restart your computer. Press F10 continuously as POS, you will be able to launch the manufacturer's Recovery Partition.

It took me 3 days of research and thinking to finally figure it out. I could not find a solution by googling but it did help me collect a lot of infos to figure out where the problem was.