On 08/03/2016 02:02 PM, PAS wrote:
On 8/3/2016 1:08 PM, Good Guy wrote:
On 03/08/2016 14:40, 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?


There is no need for the recovery disks if you are prepared to
download the full Windows 8.1 from Microsoft Website. I have done it
once when I wanted to upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1. The download is the
full version and your current OEM serial number would work.

Recovery media also contain drivers for the specific computer the OP
has, Windows 8.1 may not natively have all the drivers the OP needs.

One of my other Dell laptops had win7 OEM and I tried installing a
retail copy of win7 once with the License on the sticker and it didn't
work. OEM gets their automatic activation from the motherboard or some
kinda feature like that?! I never put in a key on OEM machines.
Besides, any one of those key finder programs I ran always gave me a
different key than the one printed on the back of the laptop. Luckily
in that machine I had been given DVDs.