hi all,

first i wanna say : great forum !

but i need to say hallo with a question,
cause since a few days i’ve got a x505vp from ebay.

the laptop didn’t come up with the original accessory, the vga/lan dongle was missing and the original dvd drive was replaced by a “noname” (mapower) firewire dvd rom. the dvd-rom works with the installed os.

the first thing i wanna do is to install a fresh (german) win xp with just 1 partition c: .
no backup recovery needed (5gb).
here’s the first problem: i can’t boot from dvd-rom cause the system didn’t boot from ilink, although it’s enabled and set first in bios.
is this only possible with the original dvd-rom, or is my firewire dvd-rom not compatible.

or should i try an alternative way to install ?
(the vga/lan dongle is missing right now (just ordered from sony), so network boot is not possible.

thx in advance for any help.

my_kill

it worked !

... with my 8 years old sony c1 pcmcia cd-rom drive.

but ilink still no boot.

my_kill

So, obviously I am not the only one who had problems booting
from non-sony firewire drives. DId anyone manage to boot
with a non sony drive at all? And why does pcmcia boot work?

Thanks

matthias

Hello again, so I suppose PCMCIA boot should work just as fine
as i.link. Am I right that the boot capablity will be needed
just once, when installing the OS, and afterwards any external
cd rom drive will do, in case the windows cd is needed again?
This would mean that one can buy a sony cd rom drive from ebay,
use it to install the OS, and then just resell it since it won
ever be needed any more. Might someone be as kind as to confirm
this… sorry for posting my sorrows so much here…

matthias

Good news for x505 owners who do not have firewire drives to
boot from: You can use a vaio pcga cd51 A pcmcia drive, which
is easily available at ebay.

matthias