Vaio A-series Hard Disk Drive Replacement Guide

[sjhodgson]

In May 2004 I purchased a Sony Vaio A115B laptop for around £1,000 ($1,800). In May 2005, the laptop's hard disk failed.

Despite numerous requests to the vendor and Sony, I was unable to persuade either that it was unreasonable for a product I paid so much money for to suffer such a serious problem in such a short space of time. I contacted Sony's laptop technical support team using vaio-link.com to ask for an estimate of the cost of replacing the hard disk. Sony's quoted price for the replacement of the defective hard disk was £100 ($180) for diagnosis plus £220 ($400) for parts and service plus whatever it would cost me to send the laptop to Sony - probably £30 ($50). And Sony didn't even tell me when I'd get the laptop back if I sent it to them for service!

Total quoted cost for Sony to replace the defective hard disk in a 12-month old Vaio: £350 ($630) - 35 percent of the original cost of the recently-purchased laptop plus an unspecified amount of time.

Since I don't have money to burn and since new 2.5" ATA-100 hard disks, like that needed to replace the defective one in my laptop, cost around £60 ($110) and whatever time I have to spend disassembling the laptop and putting it all back together (which I correctly estimated at one hour), I opted for a DIY repair - and saved £290 ($520)! At the same time I upgraded the performance of my Vaio by moving from the 4,200rpm disk Sony included to a 5,400rpm disk I installed in its place. I also benefitted from not having to wait an unspecified amount of time for Sony to mess around performing their very expensive repair of what is clearly a seriously flawed product.

I share the details of the disassembly of the Vaio A115B here for anyone else who finds it necessary to open their Sony Vaio laptop up and affect a similar DIY repair at home.

http://www.lborolinux.co.uk/sonyvaioa115b/

Enjoy.

sjhodgson
Sony Vaio A115B owner

[rich912]

Thanks for that sjhodgson, no doubt the guide will benefit many other users of this notebook.

I cannot believe that Sony refused to replace a hard drive that failed in such a short space of time, the warranty should have covered this ¿ it really is a disgrace:smileysad:

[tonybeard]

Well done. One of the most informative and helpful posts I've seen to date. Congratulations and keep up the good work here at Club Vaio. I will be combining your step by step instructions with RAM replacement instructions from Crucial.com/uk not so much to save money but to become more intimate with my Vaio. Might sound kinky but my name isn't Gary Glitter. BTW do you know of other links to reinforce these maintainance methods?

[Eugenepang]

Wow cool... and thanks..

[kee-lo_]

It's always nice to see guides like this to help other VAIO users.

Well done - and thanks !

[wheresmybeaver]

Thanks, thats a really good guide! One of these days I'll grow the balls to open up my Vaio and clean up the fans etc. I'm sure I'll probably end up upgrading the hard disc sometime in the future too.

By the way, can you then use the Sony recovery discs to reinstall Windows XP on this new hard disc? I presume so, but just checking.

Cheers again

[tonybeard]

LOL sure can recover XP WMBeaver. Like your one RAM required avatar but living in Australia for a long time I wouldn't admit that around friends. Be accepted in New Zealand but hehehe.

[sjhodgson]

By the way, can you then use the Sony recovery discs to reinstall Windows XP on this new hard disc? I presume so, but just checking.

I thought that question might come up!

I've used my original Vaio recovery disk on my modified A115B with no problems - but it's worth bearing in mind that I replaced the original 60GB hard disk with another hard disk of exactly the same capacity (just a faster speed and bigger cache) - had I replaced the hard disk with one of a different capacity, the Vaio recovery disk might not have worked, although I'm just speculating.

sjhodgson
Sony Vaio A115B owner