Sony Vaio Question 2

[spool]

Hello all,

I posted this on the Windows XP forum but with no response. So I'm posting here to see if anyone can help.

I am in the process of restoring a customers Sony's Vaio computer.

I have worked on a number of these computers with Win Xp home on 80G hard drives. Never did a restore. They all have there hard drives configured with two partitions. One partition 15Gs with Fat 32 (C:drive) which has the OS on it, the second partition (D:drive), 65Gs NTFS.

It seems that on the NTFS partition the Restore Points are being saved. I talked to Sony and they told me that's the way the computers are setup at the factory and they will not support the computer if the Fat32 partition is converted to NTFS. They will not give any reason for doing this.

I even gone to Best Buy and checked out other Viao's and they all had the same set up.

These computers are off warranty so support is not an issue.

SOooooo does anyone know why Sony does this? Can I convert to NTFS with out problems? These computers are running out of room on the C:drive partition. I would like to just use the whole 80G hard drive, no partitions. I haven't used the Sony Restoration disks yet so I don't know if there will be a choice to use NTFS on the first partition (C:drive) or just use the whole drive. WIN XP is on the default Sony recovery disk as an image it is not on a different disk so it might put it back to the state it is in now.

I think I will have a registration problem if I go and wipe out the hard drive.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks, spool



Don't argue with an idiot, he will bring you down to his level and beat you with his experience.

 

[Jomama46]

If you have a product key for XP, and a copy of XP Home then you can wipe the drive clean and repartition as desired.

Jomama

 

[wahlen]

I agree, Manufacters like to do things ass backwards. I would just wipe the whole things clean and install XP over it. If you have seperate CD's for the drivers then you shouldnt have problems anyway. IF you do then you can just download the drivers from their support site. I believe their FAT32 partition is due to the way they have setup their restore CD's

http://techsinasec.com

 

[spool]

Thanks for the info.

Jomama, good idea. When I restore a customers computer that has a XP Home system I usually upgrade to XP Pro. This one wants to stay with Home. I'm going to get a copy of Home so next time I work on a Sony I can do a clean install from it if a customer doesn't want Pro.

Whalen,"I believe their FAT32 partition is due to the way they have setup their restore CD's".

"DUH" I should have thought of that. This question has lingered for over a year. Thanks

spool





Don't argue with an idiot, he will bring you down to his level and beat you with his experience.

 

[GhostWolf]

I should have been here a few days ago apparently!

I've got a Vaio laptop, faaar out of warranty, that I've reformatted to NTFS on both partitions with 2003 Server and SQL Server running on it.

Reckon these things will work with about any thing we're silly enough to try!

 

[Wxguesser]

The FAT 32 partition is a holdover from NT4.0. Since DOS programs still abounded and would not read the NTFS partition of NT4.0, the OS was put on a small FAT 32 partition with the rest of the disk partitioned in NTFS. This allowed the installation of the older DOS programs and kept the security of NTFS for data and NT programs. Sony apparently hasn't gotten away from this policy or feels that there are enough DOS programs still out there to warrant the FAT32 partition.

Jim W.