On 08/05/2016 05:05 PM, Ken1943 wrote:
On Wed, 3 Aug 2016 09:40:47 -0400, 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?

Did you look to purchase the dvd from Sony. Probably can't get them
anymore, but worth a try.
You could also buy a new computer with Windows 10 AND SUFFER with the
rest of us. HaHaHa replaces lol


Ken1943

That's kinda what we did. We did the upgrade and oddly enough the Sony
Care software came over. I wonder if I got it to work, would it still
make the 8.1 DVD's.
I did find a thread on a site that gave a favorable suggestion to delete
the sony care folder completely and then run the update utility and it
should reload the most recent version of sony care software. That too
is a problem that the update program fails with an error when trying to
update the Sony Care program. So it might work if I try this and get
the Sony Care software working. I'm sure it will make DVD's from the
partition it has, not from the OS I have (win 10).

Anyway, it's an option. I've got images of both the old win 8.1 and win10.