Booting from cd-rom

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angeliQue

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Hi all,

Hope someone can help me with this.

I recently agreed to help a family member to reformat a Sony Vaio Notebook (model PCG-SR9G). its one of those tiny notebooks with a 10 inch screen..which means that it uses a external pcmcia card cd-rom drive.

I thought it was gonna be pretty straightforward except that the problem is I need to boot the computer from the recovery cd's but the computer does not recognise the cd-rom drive from dos. It only recognises the drive in a windows environment. (i have already enabled booting from cd-rom in the computer's bios settings)

Can somebody give me some suggestions on how i can boot from either a pcmcia cd-rom drive or a usb cd-rom drive. If not, perhaps some other way I can use the recovery disks to restore the system?

I did call sony customer service, but the only answer they could give me was to send the notebook to the service center and that it would take at least two weeks since there isn't a local service center where i live.

Thanks in advance,

angeliQue
 
Hey, to boot from the Cd-Rom drive, just go into your bios and select the first boot item as the Cd-Rom drive that you are wanting to boot from.
 
Simple way to do this...

Steps-

- Goto another computer with windows 98 (friend, family, foe).
- Create a Windows 98 boot diskette: click Start / Settings / Control Panel / double click the Add Remove programs icon / click the Startup Disk and create disk.
- Take that disk and put it into the laptop.
- Choose boot using CD-Rom drivers
- Then type "E:" (take you to your Cd-rom)
- Type "dir"
- Look for any file that is a program (.exe). It will be somewhat obvious when you see it. It restore or something to that extent.
- Run that file and your good to go!

Hope this helps,
_peace
 
hi all,

thanks for the advice.. however, i have done all that. Of course i've enabled booting from my cd rom in the bios.. i mentioned that in my first post. Also, i have tried using a win 98 boot disk, however, when i try booting with cd rom drivers, it just mentions that it was unable to detect any drives connected to my computer.

fyi.. i tried using both a pcmcia cd-rom drive (very old drive) and also a iomega predator cd-rw usb drive... (slightly newer). I have a feeling that the cd rom drivers in the win 98 boot disk are for ide cd-rom drives, not pcmcia or usb drives.. can anyone confirm that?
 
Logically, no.

USB are loaded with Windows. So no.

But maybe in a non-windows OS?

Or, again, maybe you can boot over a nic if the bios supports it?
 
Hi again,

Yes, im running win 98.. so if u say that usb is loaded when win boots.. then I guess it should work.. i will give it a try again. Anyway, could someone please explain to me how to boot over a nic?

Thanks
 
hi guys..

thanks for the email.. especially to MicroBorg for that useful link. I now understand what i have to do to boot with pcmcia or usb cd-rom support.. i haven't worked it out fully yet, but im in the process of trying.

However, say that doesn't work.. i was just wondering if it was possible for me to install windows xp on the laptop without using the cd rom drive. In other words, would it work if i were to copy the entire winxp cd onto another partition of the hard disk, and then use a boot floppy disk and then install windows xp from there? It seems logical to me.. but then again, maybe its just not possible. If anyone could help me with this, it would be much appreciated. I've really exhausted myself trying to get my pcmcia and usb drives work to no avail!

Thanks,
angeliQue
 
Thanks for the info...
Will try it out and post back to this forum if it works.. or doesn't!
 
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