Ok, so I worked out a deal with a friend. He's got two laptops loaded with spyware and viruses. Crippled, in fact. He told me that if I could fix his ultra-thin Sony, I could keep his slightly bulkier but much better Compaq.

So I agreed. The Compaq is back from the dead, minus some power issues. It's running fine and should keep working for now.

The Sony, however, is a completely different bag of tricks. It is a Sony PCG-VX88, a PIII ultra-thin. It's pretty nice, but in an attempt to reduce weight, it has no CD drive and no floppy drive from which to boot/reformat from. In an attempt to solve this, I popped the hard drive from the VAIO into the Compaq, formatted it and installed Windows. Then I put it back into the Sony, which would not boot from the drive, lacking the necessary drivers to work. I then re-reformatted the drive, which now remains empty.

I then found a USB CD drive and attempted to boot from the Sony recovery cds, but the computer will not boot from the drive. I checked the BIOS settings, which seemed fine. Previously, I had found that the USB interface would not start until Windows had loaded to the login screen.

So I ask this question: What do I try now? Do I need to update the BIOS, or am I overlooking some simple setting? I searched around google (ahem, Beryl...) but didn't find much.



thanks,
Louie

First thing would be to update the bios and see if that resolves the issue.

Second, try putting the drive in the other laptop then running the Sony recovery CD. If you are lucky it's just a dumb ghosting program and will write out the OS to the drive.

If neither of those work...

1. Get a Win98SE boot disk from bootdisk.com
2. Put the Sony's drive in the Compaq
3. Boot up with the floppy and make sure you can see the CDROM drive.
4. Make a FAT32 partition (you can convert it later) with FDISK.
5. Reboot and "format C: /s" to make it bootable.
6. Copy the i386 folder off the windows CD onto the C: drive.
7. Put the drive back in the sony and it should boot to DOS.
8. "CD i386" and then type "winnt". The OS install should start. Beware, it will be very slow on the first copy.

Posted by Washu First thing would be to update the bios and see if that resolves the issue. Second, try putting the drive in the other laptop then running the Sony recovery CD. If you are lucky it's just a dumb ghosting program and will write out the OS to the drive.

I'll update the bios.


Tried that, it recognized that it wasn't Sony hardware.

If the bios doesnt help I'll try the 98SE trick.

That's really strange. No internal CD, and it can't boot from the drive... I guess Sony wants you to pay for service. That sucks.

If all else fails, maybe you can open the case up and hook up both the HD and a non-USB CD drive. Just leave the case open while you reinstall.

Or... install a Linux distro from a floppy.

I guess Sony wants you to pay for service. That sucks.

I'm not going to touch anything from sony unless its free... they've been trying to screw people over forever now it seems. the ps2, the bmg stuff, and the ps3 is not going to be what they say it is going to be. avoid them.