Please let the poster clarify his situation more, for example, whether the hard disk is S-ATA? Where is GHOST.EXE placed (on the CD or hard disk)? According to the laptops (SONY) I've seen installing VISTA, there is only one partition on the hard disk, and it's made with SONY's special partition tool. And VISTA can only be installed on an NTFS partition. In this case, GHOST.EXE placed on the hard disk may not be recognized under DOS. And there's only one partition. May I ask where the backed-up image file will be placed by the poster? Placing it on the hard disk is obviously not okay. Please take a close look at the manual, which probably teaches the poster how to make a recovery disk. Of course, the above is just a guess. If the poster's hard disk has two partitions, he can boot with a DOS boot disk or boot CD with GHOST.EXE installed, execute the GHOST on this CD or floppy disk, and let GHOST recognize the hard disk instead of using DOS. This might work! It is recommended to use the latest GHOST 11.0. Wish the poster success!