Hi - my girfriends TR3A has just lost it’s hard disk (no warning other than 2 mins of clicking and banging before failure) so we’ve got to look at getting it replaced. It’s still in warranty so we could send it back to Sony US (we’re in the UK) but from what I’ve read on here thats going to be an ugly experience.

I guess I could just replace the disk BUT as you’ve guessed from the subject, she didn’t make any recovery disks (to be honest I agreed that as it was a Sony it probably wouldn’t fail - doh!).

Do you know of a way for me to get Sony to send out a recovery disk to me ? I read somewhere that the UK machines sometimes came with them ?

I guess a UK disk would be as good as a US one if I could get Sony UK to send one - likely ?

many thanks in advance
Andy

guess it doesn’t hurt to ask.. if it is still under warranty you should just let sony take care of it. you will void your warranty the moment you open up your tr. then again, if your warranty is almost up anyways..then it doesn’t really matter. 

these regular posts regarding harddrive failures is starting to worry me :(

Sony deserves a kick up their back side for using such cheap quality hdd in such expensive laptops and from what I’ve read in many posts it appears to be the TR’s with the hitachi drives that are having most problems. I dont think I’ve ever owned a Hitachi product…and I doubt I’d ever like to own one either!

[quote author=“Rahul”]these regular posts regarding harddrive failures is starting to worry me :(

Sony deserves a kick up their back side for using such cheap quality hdd in such expensive laptops and from what I’ve read in many posts it appears to be the TR’s with the hitachi drives that are having most problems. I dont think I’ve ever owned a Hitachi product…and I doubt I’d ever like to own one either!

Me too. Most of the time my TR moves right along when, suddenly, for no apparent reason things grind right down. Noticable, also, is what others may be refering to as the “clicking” sound… I fear it’s the drive re-seeking in an attempt to correct data-read errors. <big sigh>

Well, it did it. System ground to a crawl. Decided to shutdown and go to bed. Next morning it won’t boot and I get “disk read error…”  To be fair I’d just installed a program that was behaving erraticaly. Whether this was due to the drive remains unknown. At any rate I did a virgin install from the recovery discs and it’s working.

I’m thinking that recovery may have marked out some bad sectors, but Sony’s not telling…

Piss-poor recovery options. No real indication of how or if the disk is being prepared. If it weren’t for the convoluted install of Sony’s drivers and utilities, I’d have gone for a decent Fdisk and Format.

At any rate, it’s running fine. Pain in the… to update drivers and re-install programs. On the upside it forced me to do some housecleaning and I got a clean install of SP2.

[quote author=“dbs”]
At any rate, it’s running fine. Pain in the… to update drivers and re-install programs.

Once you have everything installed and running sweet, you should backup your entire configuration using a software like Acronis true image 7.0. That way, in the future you can restore windows in barely 15-20 mins.

This will particularly help if you’ve done a clean install like many of us and took the pains of getting the camera, hotkeys, etc to work.

I take 2 backups…one is with plain customized windows and 1 is with all the important utilities.

[quote author=“Rahul”][quote author=“dbs”]
At any rate, it’s running fine. Pain in the… to update drivers and re-install programs.

Once you have everything installed and running sweet, you should backup your entire configuration using a software like Acronis true image 7.0. That way, in the future you can restore windows in barely 15-20 mins.

This will particularly help if you’ve done a clean install like many of us and took the pains of getting the camera, hotkeys, etc to work.

I take 2 backups…one is with plain customized windows and 1 is with all the important utilities.

i got the same backup plan..

[quote author=“Rahul”][quote author=“dbs”]
At any rate, it’s running fine. Pain in the… to update drivers and re-install programs.

Once you have everything installed and running sweet, you should backup your entire configuration using a software like Acronis true image 7.0. That way, in the future you can restore windows in barely 15-20 mins.

This will particularly help if you’ve done a clean install like many of us and took the pains of getting the camera, hotkeys, etc to work.

I take 2 backups…one is with plain customized windows and 1 is with all the important utilities.

That’s pretty much what I had in mind. I’ve been concentrating on figuring out just what I want on the machine and have been accumulating new software. I actually had planned on a fresh install and backup at some not-too-future date. In twenty years and 12 machines I’ve only had one drive go belly-up. I guess I’m due.

I’m hoping that it was a matter of one or two marginal sectors that got past the OEM format and image install. Time will tell.

I’m still planning on a single partition and scouring the threads here at TRW while I sort it out.

Thanks, guys

Well I’ve had no reply from various mails to Sony US or Sony UK which is really helpfull of them.

Do you think the recovery disk set from a new TR5 would work for my TR3A ? I’m considering buying a TR5 anyway, if I put a new disk in the TR3 could I use the recovery disks from that on my TR3 ?

I guess the drivers etc should be basically the same.

thanks
Andy

it checks the BIOS.. it’s not going to work.

you could get some of the softwares directly from here:

http://web.njit.edu/~rg24/TR Softwares/

norton ghost.  the best backup!