Join now - be part of our community!

XP recovery with an external cd rom.

loqi
Visitor

XP recovery with an external cd rom.

hi fellow vaio victims - it strikes me as no surprise that only people successfully duped into purchasing a sony product can view these pages, the only thing that hasnt disapointed me about my grx516sp is the large screen.
the dvd-burner that came with the laptop died literally days after the warranty ended , i dont recall having one single successful dvd burn for that whole year , and i treat my hardware with explicit care so i believe it was a shoddy device. anyways , i was told i would have to pay 20 euro to receive technical support , seeing as my warranty was up. but i was guaranteed that they would see the problem through. so ok whatever , i was still a little irked by that. so they received the laptop , and told me id have to pay 400+ for a new dvd-burner. NO WAY i said , as the original was worthless , and 400 would get me a much better external one. at this stage i wanted to boycott sony computer products , but sadly the best option at the time seemed to be a sony external dvdbruner =/. When i confirmed i didnt want to fork out 400 for another rubbish internal dvd burner, and that they could just send me the laptop back , they told me i had to pay 85 euro more , for looking at it. i was furious , as the first time i talked to them the phone operator didnt mention this fee at all , and made it seem like 20 euro would be the full extent of the fees. i couldnt get my laptop back without paying this fee , despite trying to get my local sony dealership to pull strings of some sort , seeing as ive spent a small fortune on sony products over the last 14 years , as my father also has - and continues to do so. brand loyalty they call it. ok , now im ranting and missing the point. , what i really came here to ask was.......

i need to recover XP , but every time i boot the BIOS attempts to boot the older , malfunctional dvdburner. and not the external one. ive obviously tried to uninstall the internal one a few times , but it never leaves and everytime i restart its in the device manager again. however , i dont think uninstalling the internal one is the issue , the issue is how do i get the BIOS , to boot to an external cd rom ? or , is there an alternative way to perform the XP recovery ?

i tried going into the bios whilst booting , but i didnt see an option to boot to an external cd rom.


can someone help me ?

oh ya , it also sucks that sony dont provide us with the drivers for the components in our hardware. 2ghz of cpu is wasted on this machine , either due to poor construction or XP...id prefer windows 2000. but dont have the option.

4,500 euros to be treated like a criminal/fool. on top of years of loyalty.

i wont be buying sony computers in the future....:smileyangry:

3 REPLIES 3
profile.country.en_GB.title
kee-lo_
Member

Hi Loqi,

What a disgrace! 400¿ for a new DVD writer! My god, what are they running down there? I would have told them flying to Alsace is cheaper than their fees!

As for the problem, you can only boot from their CD/DVD drive, no external one.

loqi
Visitor

so thats it then. your cd drive dies , and so it means a slow death for your computer too ? or else pay the bills.

well.......do you know what model cdrom is compatiable with this piece of sh.it ?

profile.country.en_GB.title
kee-lo_
Member

I don't work for Sony, and I agree with you it's a shame that they don't make more reasonsable priced parts when things go wrong.