Vaio PCG-Z505JS, No OS, Help needed

I purchased a used Z505 series thin notebook which was wiped clean. I have the floppy drive and CD-PCMCIA drive for the unit but cannot get Win98SE to load from CD. The boot floppy starts the install normally but (obviously) there are no drivers for the PC card or CD player to continue. If anyone has a boot floppy with the necessary drivers or any advice on how to load win98 I would be very grateful for the info.

I plan to use this with Craig Moates OBD1 ECM software to work on my TPI Chevy and need a no frills win98SE machine to run the program.

Thanks for looking, Randy in MD

 

Hmm oldie, but goodie there.
The easiest fix is to run Windows XP or 2000.

If you really want 98 though you can do what I did when I got mine without a cd-rom. Details are a bit sketchy on this procedure as it has been a while since I did this, you may have to adjust a few things, but this is the basics of it.

Pull the hard drive out. Hook it to another machine. Partition it to have a second partition of about 600 megs. Format the first partition with fat32, then the second as well, Make the second active and bootable then copy the windows files to the second.

Replace the drive in the system, boot up, when you get a prompt, you can tell it to start win98 setup. When it tries to reboot, stop it. Pull the drive back out and change the active partition (this should enable it to see it as C drive as opposed to D drive). Put the drive back in, and finish as normal. When finished you can delete the second partition, or leave it. You can also enlarge the partition with a partitioning program later if you want.

I recommend imaging the drive once finished.

 

Thanks, Leslie

You've pretty much confirmed what I was thinking. Yes, XP is my system of choice however the software I'll need for automobile interface only runs on win98. I appreciate the guidance.

Randy

 

Having owned and worked on quite a few of the Z505 series... taking the HDD in and out will take a while unless you are going to leave the laptop disassembled while doing that.....
With that said... you should be able to locate the files online to create a startup disc with the proper drivers... You have gone into the BIOS to verify that booting will occur from floppy and then CD ROM.
There are prompts you need to use to get the CD to move forward in the formatting and loading.... such as fdisk.... etc.....
I use an older laptop at work (Sony P2 400 with 96 mb RAM) with the W98 SE OS which is required to use the software for accessing our EMS system. Feel like I am creating the wheel sometimes.....