Sony Notebook Booting from Firewire >:(
 

I just got a VAIO notebook from my friend, model PCG-R505GCP. He had never originally bought the dock (with CD/DVD/Floppy) because he thought it was a waste and I agree. Then again, I'm starting to wonder.

The WinXP installation he has on there is relatively hosed, and I want to dual boot XP (a fresh install) and SuSE (or something else). However, I can't even get past the "using a boot disc" stage.

I have tried a Firewire Sony DVD/CD burner, as well as an external Firewire enclosure with two different optical drives (A Yahama burner and a Toshiba DVD reader, both older than the notebook itself). None will boot from Firewire, even though in the BIOS I have the "Boot from i.LINK" option enabled.

All of the drives get recognized once I boot into windows, but not before.

I don't want to have to go buy that useless dock in order to simply rebuild.

Sony's support site is absolutely terrible. They don't have any BIOS updates as far as I can tell, and absolutely nothing about how to boot from Firewire.

I hope somebody has dealt with this successfully. In my searches thus far I've seen people talking about "jumping through hoops with booting from firewire" but no one actually explains how to do it. Does anyone have an idea?

TIA

Justin

*bump*

Someone please help, I can't even boot to windoze anymore :(

Here's my thought ... if you get a IDE converter, you can partion out the drive and get the windows and linux installer files on there. Then, just install from the hard disk. I've done this before with my 25Mhz 486SL laptop and it always works great.

I finally managed to get it worked out. I imagine this must've been the "hoops" people were talking about. I found a USB floppy drive (an older TEAC FD-05PU model) and (thank god I have another working computer to do this on) built a DOS bootdisk with Network support, Ghost, and Firewire drivers. At that point, I can use whatever I want to install (relatively) anything.

Hopefully someone someday looking for the same solution as myself will come across this and realize that it's really f'n hard to do things on a VAIO R505 without the dock!!

For shame, Sony, for shame...