New Harddrive instaled

[Frustratedofkent]

I've had to replace the Harddrive to my old Vaio PCV-RX305, the recovery discs will not format it. Any suggestions, please?

Regards

Frustratedofkent

[Blencogo]

Hi Frustratedofkent and welcome.

Have you replaced your hard drive with one that has the same characteristics as the original?

You need to make sure your new drive is not an 'Advanced Format' drive. Many large, newer hard drives use Advanced Formatting which uses larger 4096 byte hard disc sectors instead of the traditional drives which use 512 byte sectors.

Operating Systems older than Vista SP1 cannot recognise this advanced formatting, so you need to make sure your new drive is similar to the original and of a type formatted with 512 byte sectors or the Recovery Discs will not work.

If you are unsure, post the details of your new drive so we can check.

[Frustratedofkent]

Hi Blencogo,

Thanks for promt reply. I suspect the new drive is of a newer format. the only details of it I have are on the box it came in, which are, Code A54BU For Desktop Size 3.5" Capacity160GB ConnectionEIDE Speed7200.

I propably need new software to format it, I hope you can recomend which woul be best, also will I be able to download afterwards the programs that are on my recovery discs or will I have to purchase these becasue they wont run on the newer format.