The problem:
- I have a Sony Vaio laptop from 2010 that I wish to revert to the factory installed state.
- I had already deleted the factory-installed Recovery partition.
- I had the original recovery media on DVD, which I have made an ISO image of.
- The laptop does not have an optical drive.
- The laptop has a unique hardware configuration which makes it difficult to reinstall Windows from a Microsoft-provided installation media, all of the necessary drivers (especially for the unique NVidia GPU) mean using the OEM-provided media is best.
The attempt:
- I had used Rufus to install the Recovery ISO image to a USB stick and boot from the stick.
- This booted me into Sony's proprietary Recovery software, however it only gives the options for "Vaio Hardware Diagnostics" and "Rescue Data"
- "Rescue Data" is not useful in my situation, it's used for copying files from the HDD to an external storage device.
- If you boot from the Recovery DVD normally (using a USB DVD drive or a built-in optical drive, if present) then 2 additional options are displayed: "Restore Complete System" and "Restore C: Drive" (both pretty-much do the same thing, except the first option will recreate the Recovery partition on the HDD too).
- I took a look around the Recovery DVD ISO and found some files that change the options displayed based on what type of media the software running on - if you run the software from a HDD (which a USB stick is detected as) then it will only display the 2 non-helpful options ("Vaio Hardware Diagnostics" and "Rescue DAta"), but if it's running off a DVD drive then it will display the other files (this is done by
plugins.xml,pluginsDVD.xml,pluginsHDNORCV.xml, andpluginsHDRCV.xml). - This means I need to boot from this ISO in a way that the computer believe it's a DVD drive.
Situation:
- So I need to present an ISO to a computer's BIOS as a bootable DVD drive.
How can I do this?
