Alternative Boot Options?

[ChrisOfTheOT]

My wife, Anna & I have just bought a very pleasing new Dell laptop, which means her old R600 will be up for sale shortly. I removed the 60GB hard drive from the R600 because the Dell only had a 20GB as standard and put the Dell 20GB into the Sony.

So now the Sony R600 boots with the Dell WinXP Pro install - though I obviously can't activate it with Microsoft because the Dell is now running that issue of WinXP Pro.

Still with me?

But! I can do nothing with the Sony R600 because the only options I get after booting are 'Activate' or 'Shut Down'. (Since the Vaio BIOS will not allow booting via USB, I can't do a straight forward System Restore either.)

So - I'm stuck... :smileythinking: Unless someone can offer help here? I need to do a Full System Restore but I can't think of a way to do it 'cos we only have USB CD & PCMCIA hard drives available. (I really don't want to have to be removing hard drives again, the pins on one are already a little 'dishevelled'...)

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,

Chris

[Mandy]

Excuse my ignorance, but how are you meant to reinstall from the r600 recovery cd(s)?

My GRX boots quite happily from a SONY USB floppy drive despite the lack of USB option in the Bios.

EDIT: Does this help:

http://www.vaio-link.com/tutorials/recovery/recovery.asp?l=en&m=669

[ChrisOfTheOT]

Thanks for the reply Mandy - and the link.

To use the Recovery CDs 'properly' (or, as Sony would want), I think Sony require the purchase of a docking station. The model your link shows is a model that came with a docking unit as standard but Anna's (the R600MX) came with nowt'.

When the hard drive was changed last time, I got our local computer shop to do it because they were able to clone the drive contents too. This time, I was hoping to do it for free!

Still, since you mention that your GRX boots from a USB floppy, I'm gonna try that & let you know.

Cheers, Mandy.

Chris

[Mandy]

It has to be the approved accessory SONY floppy drive!

[kee-lo_]

Wow thats not good of Sony.
Can you not boot with the CD?
This is a joke

[ChrisOfTheOT]

Well I tried it, Mandy and, as you said, it needs to be a 'pukka' Sony FDD.

(But I found an interesting (old) thread about Sony drives and YE - the company that make/made them for Sony:

http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&c2coff=1&safe=off&threadm=92d41o%243le%241%40lyon...

Nice long link there :smileygrin: )

I wondered about Firewire (is Firewire useless?) 'cos I've got a Firewire-USB conversion lead but I can't imagine that will work. Then I thought about Norton Ghost. Now there's got to be a way to enable a System Restore with that...

I'll think about it and let you know.

Cheers,

Chris

[Mandy]

Kee-Lo,

It would seem that the model that Chris has does not come with the docking station / CD Drive.

It was "optional" on that model so the recovery CD's are useless without it.

Only alternative would seem to be boot from floppy (Win 98 boot disk?)and enable the third party CD drive.

[kee-lo_]

How about booting from memory stick?

[Mandy]

Can?you do that?

[kee-lo_]

Not 100% sure, but it's worth a try.