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
I wish I could use a Bootdisk.com utility - but none of the ones I tired worked:
"Most of the bootdisk files are self extracting images of bootable floppies. After you download the image file, insert a fresh floppy in your A: drive and click on the file to make the disk."
I tried forcing the extraction to another removable drive but the process ends the program if the A: drive isn't loaded with a disc (or disk... ?). I also tried extracting the files to floppy & copying them over but I always get a boot error along the lines 'No operating system found', or similar. (I may have been able to force the hard drive to mount as A: but things like that have cause me tricky problems in the past - and more tricky problems I don't need 
)
(And of course, any CD I used would have to be inserted into a USB drive.)
I've also found out that USB-Firewire converters are none-existant. Naturally! So I've bought a Firewire cable for our little ViPower hard drive enclosure. The ViPower 'Smart' system has the advantage of being able to use nearly all flavours of connection while mainatining the disadvantage of being irritatingly expensive. (I paid about £15 for the enclouse, £15 for the USB 2.0 cable and now £24 for the Firewire cable. I can't make up my mind if it's been worth it or not 
)
Still, as long as the blithering laptop boots...!
Anyway, I'm off now. Thanks again Kee-Lo, Mandy & Will. Will's idea was the most promising but, alas, the most disapointing! If nothing else, you've helped me learn more computerizing type stuff and it always helps to belly-ache to someone. Thanks for listening! :smileygrin:
Cheers,
Chris
I have to admit that I gave up. I was confident that keypusher's USB driver would work - but it didn't. (Though it was the same 'operating system not found' error as before, so is more likely to be my fault.) I did wonder if the config.sys etc. system files would work if copied from a floppy A: to a hard drive C: But no matter. The R600 has gone to our local computer shop, where I should have taken it in the first place. What's the point in saving money but losing (shed loads!) of time?
None, according to my philosophy. 
So, the computer shop will simply plug in a Firewire CD and that will sort it, I'm sure. Followers of this thread my remember that I have just paid £24 for a flamin' Firewire lead - but it was 6 pin, not 4 (I thought they'd be the same size 
)!
Anyway, it's on eBay as I speak - minus the normal screen picture 'cos I haven't been able to boot it! Anyway, thanks to all... How much simpler & cheaper would it have been if I'd gone to AR Computing in the first place!
Still, at least it's a chance to chat & speak to old friends again (Hi Kee-Lo :smileygrin: ), and make new ones!
Cheers,
Chris
Ah well, hope they fix it for you.
Talking about ebay I find it a bit strange they want you to start a direct debit to sell stuff... what if you only want to sell one item?
I don't know - I suppose you could pay by Credit Card. Anna has just started selling (not just buying!
) on eBay and they didn't insist on DD - it was an option as far as I remember.But, talking about eBay, the thing that has wound me up is the new (to me) policy of no reserve price below £50. How tight is that? It's not as if eBay aren't making a mint anyway - why the need for this? (I don't think eBay in the US do it, nor in Europe, as far as I know, do they?)
Doesn't stop me selling stuff though
Cheers, Kee-Lo,
Chris
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