booting from external cd drive...

[mrgame_cat]

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

[jammold]

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.

[mvanwambeke]

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)

[kee-lo_]

Those picturebooks were something else.

[jammold]

Shame they are not being produced any more, they were really nice machines!:smileysad:

[kee-lo_]

They had Transmetta CPUs too