new hard drive in sony vaio vgn-fe41s won't install windows

[jimcanno]

My vaio's disc is full and I have purchased a new 1tb hard drive with appropriate specs. I installed it, booted up from recovery discs but after getting to 100% recovery and asking me to restart the machine and telling me the install would complete I got a message saying windows cannot install on the new hard drive.

I ordered my recovery discs from Sony and was told that it would not be possible to install the operating system on a new drive but thought I'd try it anyway - seems they were right. Is there any way around this?

[rich912 · Accepted solution]

Hi jimcanno,

There is a possibility that the new drive uses 'Advanced Format' technology, i.e. it uses 4,096-byte per sector as opposed to the original drive fitted in this machine which would have used 512-byte.

If is the case then the recovery disks are not AF aware and will not install. You can install a retail copy of Windows that will be AF aware and then download all available drivers and utilities from the Sony Support site but you will lose the original Sony software that came preinstalled.

Alternatively purchase a disk drive that uses the old technology which should accept recovery from the disks provided by Sony.

Rich