Hard drive replacement

[Vegasmom28]

I have a Sony Vaio that came with windows 8. The hard drive died. I have no image. I purchased a new hard drive and installed it. I have a copy of windows 7 professional 64 bit and installed it but I cant find the drivers for it. I need the ethernet and network adapter drivers to get online. I searched their web site for them and do not see any listed for the windows 7. Will I need to get windows 8 or higher to get it up and running?

[veeg]

Hello

One way you could do this is to go here… Support for Sony products | Sony USA
fill out the appropriate info of course and down load that to a usb drive and then use that drive to install the drivers you need.. A suggested install of drivers from here. Support for Sony products | Sony USA

This is for Win 7..

[Vegasmom28]

These are the only drivers listed. The windows 8 shows network drivers. But not for windows 7 for some reason.

[Rustys]

What is the model of the Sony Vaio?

[Vegasmom28]

SVF14A15CXB

[Rustys]

You can try the Windows 8 driver and see if that works.

Since the system came with Windows 8 why not download the ISO and create the disk and install Windows 8
[COLOR=rgb(243, 121, 52)]Download Windows 8.1 Disc Image (ISO File)[/COLOR]

[Vegasmom28]

I went to the link. Downloaded the image to disk and usb. I changed the boot in the bios/Uefi but it didnt seem to read either. Tried both the new hard drive and the old. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Or what I should do at this point.

[Rustys]

Does the laptop have a DVD writer?
Did you uncompress the ISO file to the DVD and or USB drive?

[Vegasmom28]

They were not compressed. I tried to down load them 2x. The disk image file keeps showing 0 KB. There is a Win 8.1 PART file with it. Neither zipped but looks like these are not good image files.

[plodr]

Download this
Download Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool - MajorGeeks
then see if Windows 8.1 will download through that program.
I’ve used that program in the past to download copies of Windows 7 so I’d have them for our four Win 7 computers. (We have Pro 32 bit and Home 32bit and 64 bit)

[Rustys]

They were not compressed. I tried to down load them 2x. The disk image file keeps showing 0 KB. There is a Win 8.1 PART file with it. Neither zipped but looks like these are not good image files.

What does the file extension?
Should be showing an .iso

You will need to use a burning program to uncompressed it to a DVD or USB which Windows 7 has built into for burning ISO to DVD.

[plodr]

I’ve gotten PART files when a download isn’t working properly.
Note the date of the program I linked to: September 19th. Because Win 8.1 gets updated, the ISO downloaded might have changed. You might have tried to get it from MS when it was in the process of being changed with the September updates.

[Vegasmom28]

So I got a copy of the windows 8 recovery disk off ebay for $3. It started up and I got as far as selecting customers mode for install however when I select it I get another error that says "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure the disk’s controller is enabled in the computer’s BIOS menu."
I looked this up and one of the fixes it to go to the bios advanced setting and change the disk mode to AHCI. Problem is that is not an option in my bios. So idk what to do now.

[Vegasmom28]

I also changed from Lagacy to UEFI in the bios. Restarted. Booting to disk. I now get the error “0x80300002” and it says "we couldn’t install windows in the location you chose. Please check your media drive. here’s more info about what happened :0x80300002

[Vegasmom28]

Btw. All I show for drives is Drive 0 Unallocated space 698.6 GB size 698.6 free