Could not obtain a recovery drive letter?

[chirag90]

Hi

I made a mistake and it accidently formated my sony vaio, which removed everything, but i have the recovery dics, but i when i try to restore c drive, it says could not obtain a recovery drive letter, and same when i tried to restore the complete system it says the same, please help, i have tried my best but it still doesnt work please help.

Thanks

[martin.e · Accepted solution]

Hi had the same problem restoring a Vaio. When i purchased it i used the option to downgrade to XP. I created the recovery disks for win 7 as per instructions.

Now the user whos uses it wishes to upgrade to Win 7. I booted from the restore disks and had the same 'could not obtain a recovery drive letter' error when selecting the option to do a comlete recovery. I even spoke to sony's support who told me i needed new recovery disks (£40). Seeing as i had read on other forums that others had the same problems i never suspected it was my recovery disks.

Anyway, here is what i done to get it working, it was simple in the end.

Boot from recovery disks. Select the option to do the complete system recovery from the main menu, at the next screen there will be 2 options, 1 about running the diagnostics and another to complete restore the C drive, dont select either of theses but in the bottom corner you will see a check box to skip, select skip and on the next screen you will get the warning saying all data will be lost etc. Check i understand and continue from there. Then the restoration will start.

Worked perfectly for me, it seems odd having to select skip and the fact the person i spoke to at Sony support couldnt help.

I hope this helps someone else.

[dukeofurl]

Yes, actually this helped me out very much.  In my case it was a vaio laptop that was dropped shortly after the warranty expired, and I replaced the hard disk, and tried to restore it, but it would not do a complete restore, only saying that same thing "could not obtain a recovery drive letter".  I thought that I was doing everything right, in choosing a complete system restore but that did not work, and your method did.  Very minor difference.  But thank you.

[FISHoutofWATER]

This really worked. Thank so much. I have sat here for hours between phone calls to service & other forums. I've never had to re-load software so I was ready to give up when I saw this post. It worked perfectly. Great information.

[pjedwards]

This worked for me as well