Random ramblings about my vaio 505fx.

I replaced the internal harddisk with a bigger one (20GB).
The bios only recognized the first 8GB. This means all boothable partitions AND the suspend to disk partition must be below this 8GB limit.

The system recovery CD for windows doesn't work with the big empty disk.

But if you let it run, it creates the suspend-to-disk partition at the end of
the 8GB area which is what we want.

So I had to create the partitions with something else than Windows.
I used FreeBSD for that.

Partition 1: 4G (Type: 12, DOS BIG, LBA) for DOS
(use the 'first' of the two unused spaces (it is approx 8GB big) to create it.)

Write this Partition to Disk (use 'W' in the FreeBSD partition editor)

do _not_ install any os, or the recovery cd program will error out.

Now go ahead and boot the recovery cd again.

On the first screen use CTRL+C and Y to quit the batch file.
(you can now look into RECOVER.BAT to see what it would do. In my case this was
a call to 'fdisk 1 /pri:8000' which would ruin the partition table)

Call the recover tool. 'restorer -v -f z:sony c:' was it for me.

This takes a loooong time.

Now use your favourite OS again to create the rest of the partitions. 

You should have two pieces of 'unused' space. Use these to create partition 2
and 3. I allocated them both to FreeBSD.

In the end the partition Table should look like this:

Partition 1: 4G (Type: 12, DOS BIG, LBA) for Win98
Partition 2: 4G (Type: 165, FreeBSD)
Partition 3: 11G (Type 165, FreeBSD)
Partition 4: 108M (Tzpe 160, Suspend to Disk)

(The physical layout on disk is 1 2 4 3 - with 1,2,4 combined using exactly the
lower 8G  of the disk)

Now everything works as it should.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to mail me.