Sony Vaio Booting from CD headache!!!

[SinsFeelNatural]

Sheez I have a headache on my hands.

I bought this laptop today http://ciscdb.sel.sony.com/perl/modelpage.pl?template=EN&mdl=PCGZ505LSK&session_id=664ba3e38d90480aafa5a32990706119

It did not come with the Sony external cd or floppy drive.

The person I bought it from does not remember the password for their account.

The administrator password is not the default blank so I decided that a fresh install of Windows XP Pro would be best.

I have an external cd drive but I cannot get this laptop to boot from USB and it will not open a boot menu to manually choose the USB drive and the bios doesn’t seem to have an option to boot from USB.

I am thinking about trying an external floppy but I would need to purchase one.
but I am unsure if Windows XP has a native USB floppy driver?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get a fresh copy of windows installed w/o RMAing the laptop to sony?

[redduc900]

Using both an external USB CDROM and USB floppy drive, you could copy the contents of the I386 folder on the CD to the HDD, and run the XP install from there. Download the appropriate setup boot disks (either for the Home or Pro version of XP) from MS here...

How to obtain Windows XP Setup boot disks

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q310/9/94.asp&NoWebContent=1

In order to get things started after you've booted to the startup disks, you can type the following command to begin the transfer from the CD to the HDD. Assuming your local HDD is C: and your CDROM drive is D:...

XCOPY32 D:\I386\*.* C:\I386\ /E

If you wish to have the system verify that each file was read and written with 100% accuracy, simply add the /V switch after the /E switch shown above. This command will copy all of the files in the I386 folder on the installation CD as well as all of the folders and files underneath it over to the C: drive in a corresponding I386 folder.

Once the files are copied, all you need to do is run the WINNT.EXE program from the C:\I386 folder, and you should be able to start your installation.

[SinsFeelNatural]

well no matter what I did I could not get it to boot from external floppy or cd rom.

I went and purchased a laptop hard drive adapter and tried to reformat the hardrive but it says its locked and cannot access the drive via dos or windows.


:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: