Sony Vaio laptop backup problems

I have just purchased and downloaded true-image 9 for my Sony Vaio K315s laptop. I have just installed a new hard disk and used the sony recovery disks to restore my sytem to its original state, including the 5gb hidden recovery partition. I then tried to restore the C and D drives using the relevant TI9 images. When finished, the message "Windows won't load because hal.dll is missing or corrupt" appeared. I eventually resolved this by rebuilding the boot.ini file using bootcfg /rebuild from the Windows XP CD. However when windows finally loaded and I tried to acces Sony recovery module, I was told that the recovery partition had been deleted. Two questions...
1) Is there a way of avoiding the "missing hal.dll" message
2) Is there a way of restoring the system complete with sony Vaio recovery partition intact.

 

When you finished restoring with the Sony disks, what partitions were on the drive? 5GB Hidden, C and ??. Were there three partitions.

You had images of C and D, and if you restored C to C, that would not have removed the hidden partition. Where did you restore the D image to? If you happened to restore it to the hidden partition, that was when it was overwritten.

The hal.dll (hardware abstraction layer dll) should have been restored, but it wasn't, or it wasn't restored to where Windows expected it to be perhaps due to the way the partitions were restored.

 

Hi John
I first used the vaio recovery disks to restore the drive to its original factory state, presumably with recovery partition intact. I then used the Acronis recovery disk to restore first my C drive from previously produced images, to the C: partition, but amended the partition size as I as now using a larger drive. I then resored the D: drive, again with amended partition size. But in both cases, the partitons were installed on the C D partitions respectively. I was never given the option to save to the initial hidden 5gb partition. But on completion, as mentioned previously, the vaio recovery partition was deleted according to the message received when trying to access it

 

Did the Sony recovery disk make the partitions larger as well?

 

yes i think that they did.

 

Sincere thanks to all - problem now resolved - I thought that the viao recovery disk had restored the recovery partition and that there was no need to restore it from the True image disks. Evidently not - I restored it as the first partition using true image but unfortunately as it was a primary partition, and became the active drive, the computer tried to boot from it. I then changed the active partition to the C:viao dive and all now works. Phew.

 

Glad to hear that your problem is resolved.

Good work.