I have a Sony VAIO VGN-C1Z/B (three years old), and I was wondering if anyone has had any joy booting Linux from a memory card (one of those SanDisk 4gigs with the plug-in adapter). I don't really want to get rid of XP yet and was looking for a way to test Linux and see if it is for me, but didn't want to run it in an emulator as that depends on XP behaving itself. I have the card made bootable with that Peppermint Ice Linux but have realised nobody seems to think you can do this (or a USB boot) on a VAIO. Please can somebody explain if this is possible? My disk drive isn't reliable enough so this feels like my only option. Thanks in advance.

Does the Bios permit it as a booting device?

You have to tell us if it is listed as an alternative in your booting choices in the Bios page. Nothing can be done unless your hardware has the booting capability.

If your hard disk isn't reliable what is stopping you to change to a reliable one?

I have an even older Vaio, PCG-GR250K, and have found it simple to use the Plop boot manager. I had grub in place for a dual boot of XP and Ubuntu 7.04, and found it easy to add an entry in grub per Plop's instructions. Now no problem getting the thing to at least try booting from usb. Not to hijack the thread, but my remaining problem is that when it tries to boot, it usually stops and says I do not have enough memory, which is not true. I have 512M, and the live Ubuntu10.4 says it requires 384M... Anyway, you can get an older machine to boot from usb with Plop without much trouble.