On 8/3/2016 9:40 AM, Big Al wrote:
I have a Sony Vaio laptop that came preloaded with Windows 8.1 64bit
home.

I never did anything to the OS except all the updates, but now after
3-4 yrs the 'assist' button to open the Vaio Center or whatever it's
called so that I can make my recovery CD's does not work. I can't
even get the menu item to work. And by "work" I mean make the
DVD's. The program loads and I can get to the backup&recovery option
as the manual instructs me, but the only things on the page then are
the options to recover from the CD's and restore to factory settings.
Obviously this is what I want but I don't have those DVDs yet.

There are several partitions of ~500M on the drive. I'm sure one is
some program to do the work and one may be the image?

OEM Partition 260 MB
Recovery Partition 1.44GB
EFI System 260MB
Recovery Partition 833 MB
Recovery Partition 36.32 GB
C: partition 462.06 GB
D: Data 197.34 GB


Anyway since I can't get to it normally is there any way to get this
working so I can make my windows 8.1 CD's like I should have done on
day one when maybe everything worked?

Yesrs ago I bought an HP desktop after the release of Windows Vista.
There was a time-period within which I had to make the recovery media.
After the period, say 90 days, the option to make the recovery media no
longer worked. Oddly, after a major service pack update to Vista, the
message pop-up to make the recovery media returned for the 90-day period
as if the service pack "reset" the option.