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mardillo28

Hi, I hope someone can help. My VAIO has been out of use for 9 months as I can't solve this problem. I replaced a failed Hard Drive with a Western Digital 500GB SATA drive but now the Recovery Center fails at 2% with Error 333.

The web is littered with people who have the same problem after replacing a hard drive. It seems that Error 333 means that the Recovery software doesn't recognise the hard drive, maybe due to there being no partitions on the new drive from what I understand.

Apparently Error 333 is not described on the Sony support website and people say that Sony Support are no help and just say to send in the laptop to them. But I've already spent up to €200 getting a faulty hinge fixed and another €150 on the new hard drive so can't afford to spend anymore especially when the hard drive failed after just over a year's use!! I don't have a copy of Windows to do a clean install.

Any help on how to get the recovery disks working would be greatly appreciated!! (They are not faulty - I have a set of my own and a new set from Sony)

suntattood

I have learned this type of issue from a friend where he already spent a total of $500 or more just to have his hard drive fixed, but unfortunately, what happened is different. What I did was I simply buy a new one which works better.

Blencogo

Which model hard drive have you purchased? If it is one with Advanced Formatting then the Recovery Discs may not recognise the larger sectors.

Blencogo

Sorry, can you also tell us which model Vaio you have?

KatherineYH

Didn't you try to reset BIOS to defaults? Or, maybe, upgrade it to a newer version? Maybe it's some kind of HDD and SATA controller incompatibility? Try to switch SATA controller modes through BIOS, if it's possible. By the way, the new HDD is the same type\size\manufacturer? And the last - didn't you try to contact the support?

By the way, what's located on the recovery disk? May be it's just a program, that starts the recovery process from a hidden recovery partition on your old HDD? No partition - no recovery.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/130248-sony-vaio-recovery-error-333

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