Restoring clean Vista on VAIO

As all Sony VAIO owners know, Sony has stopped shipping working Recovery Disks with their VAIOs. Instead, they ship their VAIOs with a hidden recovery partition on the harddisk (HDD) and you are expected to burn your own recovery DVDs using the Sony VAIO wizard BEFORE you do something drastic to your laptop - like trashing the HDD with a messed up Linux installation for example, or simply having a dead HDD which renders the "press F10/F11/F12 key on bootup to access hidden recovery partition recovery" option impossible.

Now when it comes time to recovery through the disks you created through the VAIO wizard, it'll be nice if those disks WORKED but nooooo... The SZ-series laptop I got had an outdated version of the Sony Update Center with an equally outdated version of the VAIO Recovery Center (which I didn't know at the time) so the recovery disks I burned, all 3 copies of them (6 DVDs in total), were faulty and unable to be used. Thankfully I had the sense to backup the hidden partition as an image somewhere else using the Linux dd function and was able to recover the hidden partition back to the new HDD after the original one died. So here's a word of caution for those new Sony VAIO owners - keep running the Sony update until you ensure you have the latest version of all Sony software before trying to burn those recovery disks. And if you are unlucky enough to not have any working recovery disks, good luck trying to get a copy from Sony Technical Support.

For the next step, any owner of a VAIO will know that Sony insists on shipping their laptops with lots of time-limited trial programs and other unnecessary stuff - commonly termed as 'bloatware'. These bloatware will be reinstalled even if you "reformat" using the recovery options. I will list two options for recovering Vista without installation of these bloatware:

1. Kill the Sony process during recovery before it has chance to copy and install the bloatware

This method is taken from this thread at NotebookReview.com.
  1. Make a copy of the VAIO Recovery folder on the laptop (usually located in C:\Windows\Sonysys\ or C:\Program Files\Sony) somewhere else on an external drive. Ensure that it contains the Launch.exe or Launcher.exe program.
  2. Start the recovery process using whichever option suits you (hidden partition or working recovery disks).
  3. The computer may reboot a few times during this process. Keep a watch out for a screen with a window on it and a progress bar. The title of the process bar will be something like "Copying files to C: drive" or "Installing software".
  4. If there's a "Cancel" button in the lower right corner, hit that NOW. Else press Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up the Task Manager and kill the Launch.exe or Launcher.exe process that's installing the software.
  5.  Allow the Vista installation process to complete and you should have a semi-clean system with perhaps a few unfortunate programs you do not want. Uninstall these.
  6. Now copy the VAIO Recovery folder you backup in step 1 to its original location and run the Launch.exe or Launcher.exe to install back necessary software such as connectivity-related programs.
Congrats, now you have a fairly clean VAIO without most of those irritating bloatware!


2. Extract the plain vanilla Vista from the Sony recovery image

This is one long and lengthy step taken from this thread also at NotebookReview.com.
  1. Firstly, copy the VAIO Recovery folder (usually located in C:\Windows\Sonysys\ or C:\Program Files\Sony) somewhere else on an external drive. Ensure that it contains the Launch.exe or Launcher.exe program.
  2. Download the software mod2wim (alternate link) which will extract the files from your Sony image. (For fuller details of what the software does, you can follow the links on the original thread.)
  3. Extract mod2wim to the root of your C: drive. So you should have a folder C:\mod2wim with the software files inside.
  4. Run Mod2Wim.bat with administrator privileges. (Note that if you're running a 64-bit OS, you need to modify Mod2Wim.bat and change all instances of "imagex32\" to "imagex64\" to use the imagex64 driver as explained here.)
  5. Now I'll assume you're running Mod2Wim on the Sony laptop with the hidden recovery partition intact. If not, select option "S" to point to the location with your recovery data, e.g. "d:\VAIOrestore\" with the trailing slash. (Refer to the original thread for more information.)
  6. Select option 2: Copy & Process MOD/SYN Files to extract the .wim files to the Wim folder (C:\mod2wim\wim).
  7. Select option 5: [Un]Mount Patched Files to extract the wims. A folder will be created for each wim and you will be able to see the MSI or setup files. There should also be a sony.wim in the Wim folder which is our vanilla Vista with basic Sony drivers.
  8. Copy the MSI and setup files of the software you want to an external drive (e.g. Sony Smart Network; Wireless LAN driver; Photoshop/Premiere Elements etc.). We'll be needing them later.
  9. Burn the sony.wim (found in C:\mod2wim\wim) and the imagex folder (C:\mod2wim\imagex32 if your Sony Vista is 32-bit or C:\mod2wim\imagex64 if your Sony Vista is a 64-bit version) to a disc (probably DVD as the file is quite large).
  10. At this point, you need a Vista disc. Any disk as long as it is bootable with the Vista recovery console. You can get a Vista Recovery Disk from NeoSmart Technologies if you don't have one.
  11. Place the Vista disc into your laptop and turn it on. Follow the instructions until you see the option to repair Vista.
  12. Select the Command Prompt option.
  13. Replace the Vista disc with the DVD containing sony.wim which you burned earlier.
  14. Type the following at the command prompt (WARNING: this will format and erase your drive!) 
    format c: /fs:NTFS /q
  15.  Change to the CD drive, e.g. 
    d:
    (it could be D, H or F on your laptop. Check that you got the right drive by typing dir into command prompt and see if the sony.wim is there.)
  16. Now type the following at the command prompt to apply the Sony Vista image to your drive: 
    imagex\imagex.exe /apply sony.wim 1 c:\
  17. Once done, leave the sony.wim disc in the drive, exit command prompt and choose to restart the laptop from the Vista recovery console.
  18. When you finally have the clean Vista running, copy the VAIO recovery folder back to its original location and install whatever software you need from Launch.exe or Launcher.exe as well as the extracted wims earlier.
Congrats, now you have a clean VAIO without those irritating bloatware!

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