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

[kee-lo_]

Give him 7 days and send round the linch mob!
If he doesn't pay he doesn't get.

[ChrisOfTheOT]

Well, here's the end of this ugly monster of a thread - at long last.

It turns out that keypusher's advice was spot on, but I still needed a further file: USBCD.SYS. At microsoft.public.win3x_wfw_dos, TR pointed me to a source:

"You can still find usbdrive.zip which contains two versions of usbcd.sys.
Link: http://www.hdtronic.de/zip/usbdrive.zip "

Of course, it meant that I had to take the flamin' hard drive out yet again but at least this time I could put it in the enclosure, rather than into the new Dell. I transfered both the files (USBCD1.SYS and USBCD2.SYS) but *CD1 worked first time. Marvelous! :smileygrin:

Now I need to find out how to do a System Restore from DOS, via USB and I'm done - but I've started a new thread for that!

Cheers to everyone for helping,

Chris

[BassFreak]

My suggestion to this problem would be:

- Install the 20 gig drive in the dell. Boot the dell with windows 98 boot disk or bootable windows 98 cd-rom and at the start press F8 and select command prompt with cd-rom support.
- Then format the harddrive with format-command (so after this it's in fat or fat32 format so that windows 98 can handle it)
- Type "sys c:" so that you make the c: -driver bootable and transfer some basic dos to it.
- Type "fdisk /mbr" to make sure the computer can boot the windows 98 dos.
- Copy the contents of the windows 98 installation cd to a folder on the harddrive for expample c:\win98inst

- After that if all went as they should shutdown and install the 20 gig harddrive back to the vaio.
- Start the vaio and you should be able to get to (windows 98) dos
- Go to the folder where you copied the installation cd (c:\win98inst) and start the installation from there

You could also make the harddrive bootable as adviced in beginning of this message and copy the windows xp installation cd to the harddrive and install it from there instead of the 98