Hi,
I was recently forced to reformat my newly purchased laptop. The story
is that I had DriveCrypt Pro Pack installed (with bootauth activated),
and Acronis acted up by somehow preventing the computer from booting.
It would simply display a black screen with a flashing white underscore
at the upper left corner, where nothing could be typed until I popped in
the DCPP (DriveCrypt) emergency recovery disk to call up the boot
authorisation log in screen.
Even after uninstalling Acronis, there was no way I could log in
without the DCPP emergency recovery disk. I was not about to carry the
recovery disk around with me every time I wanted to reboot my computer,
even though everything else (i.e. the system after logging in) was
performing top notch. Getting very irritated, I first thought the fault
lay with DCPP (and, perhaps, it partly did -- as it turns out, DCPP told
me that the bootauth file was invalid and disabled the option to remove
bootauth, but then would not allow me to create a new bootauth saying
that I already had bootauth installed; furthermore, I apparently could
not decrypt my drive without a valid bootauth). After consulting their
customer support (they were very prompt and tried hard to be helpful,
but unfortunately reached the conclusion that the only options I had
were to take out the HDD and install it as a slave on another computer
to fix it, or to reformat), I ended up opting to reformat. I later
discovered that I was not the only one experiencing this 'black' screen
of death with Acronis, but now I digress.
Reformatting sadly did not turn out to be any easier. Vaio SZ6 did not
come with any recovery disks, but rather a recovery partition within
the HDD. To call it up, I would have to press F10 during boot up, but
due to the problem booting up, I could not for the life of me get the
F10 method to work. Desperate, I turned to the recovery disk for my old
HP laptop, which contained Windows XP and other necessary drivers for
the HP laptop. Using this disk, I was finally able to reformat
partition C:\ and temporarily installed Windows XP. I do not know if
the incompatible drivers (since they weren't meant for the Vaio) were
installed during this process.
Following this, I used the F10 method to call up the recovery partition
and chose to restore C:\ to factory condition (which I assumed would
remove the XP and reinstall Vista). This, it did . . .
My problem is that this post-reformat version of Vista just can't seem
to be able to reach the blazing performance level the original Vista
displayed. Booting is slightly laggy, shutting down is so-so (though
not dramatically worse than the original), Firefox is also slightly
laggy, launching programs take longer than the original, and
explorer.exe seems to crash at a moment's fancy. I performed all the
optimisation tricks I had bestowed upon the original Vista (defrag,
TuneXP, services.msc, msconfig, optimal Vista settings, and so on), but
it's just not as great as the original used to be.
I would really rather not go through another reformat, especially
seeing as I have no guarantee that the third reformat would restore the
machine to its original glory. Is there something -- anything -- I can
do to help the situation?
Thank you for taking your time to read my long-winded tale . . .
--
Kuroki Neko
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