Share your experience!
hi guys...
my mate has a sony vaio fxa35/d and the internal cd drive has broken. he wants to reinstall the operating system and has an external usb cd/rw drive. is there any way to force the laptop to boot from the external drive?
cheers for your help guys
Linux Live distros (free) will allow your mate to copy the CD's contents to the hard drive.
You will need to make these from a working PC.
If you make an MS-DOS Boot CD you can then set your HDD to be active, or you can use the Microsoft Windows XP Boot Image, get it from http://www.nu2.nu/download.php?sFile=wxp10.zip and uncompress this on to the CD, then burn it.
Hopefully you will be able to get a working OS on your mates computer. Remember that because Sony are bad at supporting external USB devices natively in the BIOS, you will need a boot disk or Linux to overcome this limitation.
Of all the Distros out there, I recommend trying Knoppix Live (Linux-Tag), which uses the excellent HotPlug service.
Indeed there are no BIOS updates ( for none of the computers ) that enable you to boot from a USB device.
( the only time that was ever inported was on the C1MHP, and that was only for a Sony floppy drive via i-link)
Those picturebooks were something else.
Shame they are not being produced any more, they were really nice machines!:smileysad:
They had Transmetta CPUs too