Sony Z505-HS Question

OK, I know this is ancient history but....

I have one of the above Sony Vaios and I'd like to wipe out the disk and restore the Sony-supplied Windows98SE operating system. I have the System Recovery CDs but apparently you have to boot from them in order to get them to "work". I see in setup that there are three boot choices: diskette, hard drive and ATAPI CD-ROM; unfortunately I am using a Yamaha Firewire drive.

Is there any way to restore the OS from the Sony disks or do I HAVE to have an ATAPI CD-Rom drive (which I assume was the original accessory drive sold for this notebook).

Thanks in advance for any info. I realize the chance of anyone knowing this and/or being interested is kind of small, but I need a laptop for Delphi development and can't afford a new one. The existing laptop is SO loaded it would take me a year and a day to clean it up "by hand" and install just what I need.

=NLK=

 

I'm not sure if the VAIO supports firewire peripherials to boot. What you will need is a boot disk from the CD manufacturer with the DOS drivers for your firewire CD drive. If you can boot to DOS and see your firewire CDROM drive then you might be able to start the recovery from DOS. Other than that I'm not sure what you can do. There must be a way....don't give up!

--Trevor--

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by nlk10010

 

Thanks to both of you for posting.

The BIOS apparently only supports booting from the original ATAPI CD-Drive, as Skyshade mentions. When I bought the Vaio Sony made it clear that it only supported (i.e. had drivers) for Windows 98SE; I would have needed to buy another model for XP support. On top of that the machine only has 128MB. I suppose I could see what the CD-ROM is going for and reinstall 98SE, which is really all I'd need for development. Perhaps pickup another 128 as well.

Decisions, decisions. [V]

=NLK=

 

You can run XP quite well, but you DO need the ram upgrade ($35 at geeks.com). I have a Z505R and a Z505LS, both with XP SP2.

The bad news, as the other post mentioned, is that you must have the original PCMCIA CD-ROM to boot from. I also got one off of eBay. I think that the Sony PCMCIA DVD-rom is also bootable and would be a much better investment. Expect to pay $100 for the CD and $130 for the DVD. Good Luck!