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Old August 13th, 2015, 02:31 AM
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jtdoom jtdoom is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
O/S: Windows 8 Pro
Location: Belgium, East Flanders
Posts: 5,990
Hi,

it"s been too long ago I had a Vaio to look at, and there are so many different vaio models anyway... But, let's not have that stop me from giving you some of my thoughts.

That laptop may have some hard disk protection enabled in its BIOS (so as not to be able to unwittingly remove the hidden recovery partition, etc.)

The partition table in windows 7, apart from that drive having the hidden recovery partition, would be different than what windows 8.1 or windows 10 would show.
One would have a hidden partition with size of a "few" GIGA for the windows installation file (WIM) and application setup files in its compressed form.
Then, one would see system boot partition of 100 MEGA (for win7) or 350 MEGA for win 8.1), and then there would be your C: drive (usually the rest of the hard drive)

I done my upgrades to win 10 from 8.1, so I don't see differences in the 350 meg, but upgrading from win 7, I suspect there are some possibilities for how thing were done.
The 100 meg bootloader partition may have been resized during upgrade (or there may have been another method like creating a 350 alongside and inactivating/disabling the win7 bootloader... I dunno how a drive looks like after upgrade from 7 to 10, see.

But, since they use different size bootloader partitions in 7 and 8.1 (100 vs 350) , something was done.

A clean setup would expect no drive access protection, and custom setup/custom drive partitioning from within setup would enable you to wipe the old bootloader partition (insufficient size for 10 bootloader) after you deleted the C: or windows partition.


Setup should ask you if you have drivers, and will surely ask you to look for updates prior to setup (unless you skip this, it will look for updates if it can get online)

To find updates and drivers, it has to be able to get online (with a non-working Network interface, that would find you none. If you had a wireless connection, it might help if you temporarily disable password protected login on the WIFI / router... Heck, your router may have security settings for computers connected to it by cat5 wires. Most households don't have that kind of router security setup, but some people do use the extra security settings a router offers. -I do, for instance.-
8-)

So, you may have to find the windows 8 drivers for your vaio model, particularly hard disk controller and network (all else can come later. but controller for HDD is needed or you cannot get anything on the hard drive, NIC is very useful, and chipset is a must-have (you might think chipset has the HDD controller, but chipset is needed for enhanced performance of system buses, not for basic access.)

Nvidia or ATI mobility for graphics are handy to have a download of.

also, I doubt F6 still triggers I have a driver for you, but it might.
(PLEASE let me know if that triggered a question 'please insert media' (it asked for floppy with extracted drivers on it, in old times.)

Oh, unzip drivers you found before you put them on USB or rewritable CDRW
(Setup may not be able to read from USB, it might be able to read from CDRW... This Might work for you.)

so, in a nutshell.
Is drive access protected by Viao BIOS?
Can setup get to the driver it needs to access your hard disk?

Can you afford to wipe the recovery partition? (this might be left on, but the 100 meg win 7 bootloader partition should not stay, and that can only be removed if the windows partition also gets deleted.)

I am sorry for being vague. As I said, I do not have a Vaio to experiment on.
(the upgrade to 10 from 7 that is planned in a very near future is a laptop that should not be wiped, so I won't do drastic experiments on that either.)
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