On Wed, 03 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?

You list 3 separate recovery partitions.

This may be why the software can't locate the correct one.

You could always try having a look inside all 3 to see which one looks the
most likely to be the real recovery partition.

You could then image all three, then delete the least likely two and try
again.

By deleting and restoring each partition you should be able to eventually
test all three; perhaps one of them will work.

Of the three, the 36.32 GB one looks a tad large.

For guidance, a W7 Pro 64 bit ISO is just over 3 GB and a W10 Pro 64 bit
ISO is around 3.6 GB. So neither of the small ones looks big enough, and
the big one looks 10 times too large (unless you mis-typed the size). If
it was 3.632 GB that would look about right for an install with extra Sony
goodness bundled in.


Cheers

Dave R


--
Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box