Tuesday, October 19, 2010

How to delete OEM Recovery Partition

I had Sony Vaio, installed with windows vista, and since these days the laptops dont come with the Operating system and device driver CD, they usually give a backup facility, for which they reserve a partion, and hence that space cannot be utilized.

Recently I have upgraded to Windows 7, and I dont need this partition anymore, so I wanted to remove the partition, I could have done it easily while installing windows 7, but once its installed, it cannot be directly removed from with the windows using the Computer Management program in windows. We need to used the command prompt version of Disk Partition utility.

Here is a guide to do the same,

Open the Diskpart application by either typing in "Diskpart" (without the quotation marks) into the search, or type "Diskpart.exe" into Run by pressing the Windows key + R.

Now with Diskpart open, you must enter the following command lines:
  • Type "list disk" without the quotation marks and press enter.
  • Type in "select disk 0" and press enter.
  • Then type in "list partition" and press enter.
  • Then type in "select partition x" x=the recovery partition you wish to delete, replace x with the recovery partition number and press enter.
  • Then finally type in "delete partition override" and press enter.
That should do the trick.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Windows 7, With All Drivers on Sony VAIO CR313H

Recently I have upgraded from the so called the slower version of windows (Windows Vista) to windows 7, the latest and the faster one. Everything looked nice, until I realize that my webcam is not working when I try to use Google talk on Gmail for video call. I was bit worried, thought it is not so difficult to fix it, as I knew camera driver is missing, and I did some google-ing and found that it’s not so easy to get your camera working on the laptop, mostly because it is a 2 year old laptop and Sony Vaio’s official site does not give any drivers and nowhere else also the exact drivers are available.
 
Now I did worry a bit more, but without losing hope I did some more research on the internet and found that there is driver for the web camera which many people have claimed to work on VAIO laptops. I did give a try, and amazing! It’s working!! Here is a link to download the same if you are having similar problems.
 
I was wondering, if other things on my laptops are working fine, I found that the display and the graphics drivers are missing, and Bluetooth and WLAN switch setting is missing, SD Card Reader is not working, None of the function keys are working, especially the brightness control keys, and Fn+F7 (Dual Mode + Monitor Extension). This is now a serious problem, I thought I must fix this. I called up one of my friend who works for Sony; he was on his way back to native for his sister’s engagement, so wasn’t so useful.
 
I did more search on the internet to find the display driver for my Intel graphics accelerator x3100, and after installing that the graphics did flicker few times, but worked wonders and I could see all the options I was able to see when Vista was there, I was happy, this was the first success. Here is a link if you want to download the same driver for your CR313H laptop, or with the same Intel graphics accelerator.
 
Later for the others, I started searching to make function keys working, and while searching, I found a forum on windows 7, where things which are solved are marked as SOLVED, which helped find the thread easily, and I found memory card driver, you can download it here.
 
I also got a thread, where someone had installed all the utilities needed for the functions keys to work properly. You have to download and Install the following Utilities from the SONY VAIO ftp link ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/ORIGINAL/ . And Note that all the below needs to be installed in the same order for it to work properly. Download the LATEST version available for each of them and install.
  1. Sony Firmware Extension Parser (SFEP) Driver
  2. Sony Shared Library
  3. Setting Utility Series
  4. Vaio Control Center (if you want it)
  5. Vaio event service
This makes all the features on my SONY VAIO laptop work. If you have any problems, feel free to write to me.