Hard drive corrupted, now nothing works

[huglazar]

My sony vaio VGN-AR71ZU hard drive 1 died. As it was raid0, I lost both harddrives.

I bought a new drive, and had to purchase a new copy of windows vista ultimate, but now none of the viao kit works. I have tried downloading the drivers from the support site, but there are none for the important things.

The wireless modem does not work.

The keyboard works, but not the hotkeys, like the button to open the dvd tray, or the volume etc...

WinDVD BD is nowhere to download

The camera does not work.

The list goes on.

Does anyone know where or how to get hold of the original drivers? I have tried support, but cannot find anything but links to companies that want 100's of pounds to send me the drivers.

[franktfe]

Hello huglazar.

Here you can find all drivers originally installed.

http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-AR71ZU

WINDVD BD is a software suplied for free (as a gift) with the computer and i´m not sure you can get it free. Anyway you can install freeware as BURNAWARE for burning all kind of discs.

I hope i´ve been helpful and please forgive my bad english.

Regards.

[Blencogo]

I assume you did not make a set of Recovery Discs as you were advised when you first bought the Vaio?  They would have provided everything you need - all the drivers, software like Vista Ultimate and programs like WinDVD.  It may have been cheaper and easier to purchase a set of Recovery Discs from Vaio Support than to have bought a new version of Vista Ultimate.

Although you cannot download the operating system and some of the preinstalled software, you should be able to download all the drivers and utilities to get your Vaio working properly.

You can download all the required drivers (including the Ricoh Camera Driver and the Intel Wireless LAN Driver) from here: -

http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-AR71ZU

To get the hotkeys to work, you need to download the Original Utilities Package from the above link, extract the files to somewhere you can find them (like C:\Utilities) and install all the Utility Programs in order.

All the downloads you need should be there and I recommend that you install ALL the Drivers and Utilities because Vista Ultimate will try to install any old driver it can find and these may not be the ones dedicated to your Vaio.

Good luck and come back if you have any problems.