Hello one and all,

I am hoping that someone can help me with a problem I am having with a second hand Sony VAIO PCG-C1F that I have been given.

The problem is that I am completely unable to get it to boot from any CD drive. I wish to replace the installation of WinXP with a copy of Linux, but it refuses to boot from a CD drive. It is quite happy to boot from a USB floppy drive, and obviously from the harddrive. I have tried both PCMCIA and USB 1 and 2 external CD drives and none will boot. (The USB 1 External drive I tried most definately work on another model of the SOny VAIO PCG-xxx range.)

I can boot from a Windows DOS disk to a command prompt and even then it still won't recognise the CD drive. It is only when Windows has fully loaded that any kind of CD drive is recognised.

I have tried to update the laptop's BIOS, but the only update file I have found, on the Sony website, refuses to flash.

Any help would be appreciatted (or just anybody who has experienced the same thing as this is very frustrating).

Thanks to you all.

The laptop BIOS MUST be compatible with BOOT from USB CD etcetc

If you have a PCMCIA CD CARD DRIVE you can try the following DOS Driver ARCCD.SYS:

83.67.55.228/arccd.sys

..which needs to be included on the W98SE (MS-DOS) boot disk.

Otherwise you will need unsupported MS-DOS USB Drivers or a Linux Solution

WHat would the Linux solution be? Every time I have tried Linux on this system it has insisted on rebooting the computer at some point during the installation and then trying to restart from the CD to continue copying the installation files (at which point it can no longer recognise the CD drive and the installation aborts).

Is there a way to install a newish version of Linux by boot from a floppy first so that it can load in the necessary drivers?

http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwboard/wwwboard.html