Hi
I’ve recently come into possession of a Sony Vaio VGN-N230E notebook computer (http://esupport.sony.com/CA/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNN230E&LOC=3) and I’m having problems restoring it to factory preset.
I got it from a friend who forgot his password. Now I want to reformat it, but the obvious problems arise. I cant access the partition after logging into the OS by virtue of the fact that I don’t know it. And every time I attempt to access the recovery partition using F8 (I love how they keep changing it from F12 to F11 to now F8) the only way I can recover the system back to factory preset is if I have an administrator code.
This is the single most annoying thing I find about Vista because a while back I had to figure out a way to restore an Acer when I didn’t know the Administrator password either. And lo-behold I had to hold some nonsensical series of buttons down to access the recovery partition that didn’t require a password (It was like Alt + F11 or something)
Anybody have any ideas? I have no idea how to access the recovery partition on this unit to reset it, I have no recovery disks or spare copies of VISTA kicking around I can use, and there is absolutely no way I can get that password.