Hello All
First time poster. I'm trying to do a little forensic work on behalf of my mom, whose VAIO desktop refuses to do a system recovery.
The backstory: She bought a VAIO RS310 several years ago from the good folks at Best Buy (cough), along with their extended warranty. Last year a power surge spiked the mobo, so Best Buy put in a new one for her (the original hard drive and its contents survived). Worked fine after that.
Last week she asked me to help clean out her machine, just do a straight forward wipe using system recovery. But multiple attempts from the restore disks and recovery partition all failed, each with the following message: "Model number does not match recovery disks." Strange....so I ran a system information report, and what did I find? The model number now says RS220.
Well, I'm no techie, but to me it looks like Best Buy substituted a different (albeit functional) motherboard when they did the repair. If that's the case, then when I tried to run system recovery, Windows Product Activation must have looked for the original hardware hash and flagged the discrepancy. Is this a reasonable conclusion? I have to wonder what the Geek Squad did to re-authorize Windows after the mobo replacement--probably dialed the toll free number at MS--but whatever they did, it definitely wasn't a system recovery. The cynic in me thinks they just bootlegged a quick fix and bet the "little old lady" would never attempt one.
Anyway, the computer's warranty just expired, and Sony wants $300 to service it. Heck, it's not even worth that much on eBay. Mom is pretty much screwed at this point.
So, any of you got some thoughts about this? I'd like to take up the matter with Best Buy, but I really don't have enough knowledge about the hardware to make an effective argument. Just want to know if I'm looking in the right direction with my initial assumption, or what other factors might be causal. It's been used as-is out of the box since she bought it, so I can't think of anything.
Thanks-
Ice
First time poster. I'm trying to do a little forensic work on behalf of my mom, whose VAIO desktop refuses to do a system recovery.
The backstory: She bought a VAIO RS310 several years ago from the good folks at Best Buy (cough), along with their extended warranty. Last year a power surge spiked the mobo, so Best Buy put in a new one for her (the original hard drive and its contents survived). Worked fine after that.
Last week she asked me to help clean out her machine, just do a straight forward wipe using system recovery. But multiple attempts from the restore disks and recovery partition all failed, each with the following message: "Model number does not match recovery disks." Strange....so I ran a system information report, and what did I find? The model number now says RS220.
Well, I'm no techie, but to me it looks like Best Buy substituted a different (albeit functional) motherboard when they did the repair. If that's the case, then when I tried to run system recovery, Windows Product Activation must have looked for the original hardware hash and flagged the discrepancy. Is this a reasonable conclusion? I have to wonder what the Geek Squad did to re-authorize Windows after the mobo replacement--probably dialed the toll free number at MS--but whatever they did, it definitely wasn't a system recovery. The cynic in me thinks they just bootlegged a quick fix and bet the "little old lady" would never attempt one.
Anyway, the computer's warranty just expired, and Sony wants $300 to service it. Heck, it's not even worth that much on eBay. Mom is pretty much screwed at this point.
So, any of you got some thoughts about this? I'd like to take up the matter with Best Buy, but I really don't have enough knowledge about the hardware to make an effective argument. Just want to know if I'm looking in the right direction with my initial assumption, or what other factors might be causal. It's been used as-is out of the box since she bought it, so I can't think of anything.
Thanks-
Ice