Skip to main content

Recovering Sony VAIO VGN-N110G

We have a pretty much old, by today's standard, Sony VAIO VGN-N110G running on Windows XP. This machine was hit hard by a virus and MS Security Essentials was not doing its job. Not sure if Security Essentials is a good anti-virus but I am using it anyway (hey it is free).

The virus was pretty smart and distructive. Though the data files were not deleted but it did  delete the menu entries in Windows leaving it almost unsable. Initial impression of the virus was that it hides all files making you believe that everything was gone. It even offers a solution, like buy an anti-virus. Anyway, as I mentioned above, I did try to do full scan using MS Security Essentials, it was able to identify several and it did mention that the virus was removed. But the system was still unusable after the anti-virus cleanup exercise.

So I tried to fire-up VAIO recovery to no avail. It says it cannot find the restore drive. It was really getting so bad.

Rebooting into safe mode does not help. So tried another reboot but this time I pressed F10 by mistake. What a surprise, F10 during boot actually allows the user to recover the system.

Good job here Sony, this feature is very handy.

So, to summarize, Sony VAIO VGN-N110G can be recovered by rebooting the machine and hit F10 just after the BIOS checks.

Tag:
Sony VAIO cannot find recovery drive.

~ts

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Error! Could not locate dkms.conf file install VirtualBox 4.1.8 on Ubuntu 11.10

Tried to update my Ubuntu host today and it did pickup that new version of VirtualBox is available (4.1.8). All other packages installed properly except that VirtualBox installation was complaining about missing dkms.conf file, see error message below. $: sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup * Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ] * Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules Error! Could not locate dkms.conf file. File: does not exist. [ OK ] * Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS [ OK ] * Starting VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ] Though it looks like installation was fine but I am concerned about its effects to VirtualBox functionality. To fix this, do: $: cd /var/lib/dkms/vboxhost $: sudo rm -r 4.1.4 $: sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup Of course you have to re

The following add-ins could not be started MonoDevelop.GnomePlatform

Installing MonoDevelop in OpenSUSE 12.2 from its repository was very easy. When running it for the first time though I got the message: The following add-ins could not be started: The root of the trace shows MonoDevelop.GnomePlatform,2.8 A quick search shows that MonoDevelop depends on libgnomeui . This should have been part of dependencies when installing the application but well.... Below is the screen shot of the error message. References: http://software.1713.n2.nabble.com/MonoDevelop-and-openSUSE-12-1-td7462957.html [2013/04/09] - Same issue observed in OpenSUSE 12.3 and also the same fix. [2014/11/02] - Same issue observed in OpenSUSE 13.3, mondevelop 3.0.6 and the same fix.