Old Sony Vaio and Puppy Wary distro won't boot
 

Hi all.

(my first time here, sorry if it's in the wrong place!)

I'm in a spot of bother.
I have a Sony Vaio PCG-Z600RE(/K) and I can't for the life of me get Wary 5.5 to even boot past the boot: prompt from the PCMCIA CD drive.

I've tried the old ide1=0x180 trick, didn't work.
I've burnt numerous disks from different places (most up-to-date Puppy, DSL etc.) at different speeds and it just refuses to boot.

It was not burnt on the drive it is reading from, since the external drive cannot burn disks. However, I have burnt from the same drive I have burned the Linux disks and it's read them with no problem. For instance, my Win2K disk.

I get an error about a .sfs file not found. It then kicks me into a prompt that's about as useful as MS-DOS (in today's standard).

The specs follow:
Intel Pentium 3 ~500MHz
128MB RAM
16x PCMCIA disk drive
1024x768 12" screen
No battery, since the old one is toast and to get new ones they cost 4x more than I paid for the laptop
Windows 2000 Professional SP4 (what it was designed for)

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks a ton,
ihaterain5620

Oh, and um, apologies if this kind of thread has been done to death, but I never seem to get a good answer from the older threads.

Don't know if you have looked at this article on the Z600RE or not.

-->http://tuxmobil.org/sony_z600re.html

It shows the ide parameter to be note the ide2 not ide1. There are some other useful pieces of information on how to get the PCMCIA CD rom drive to work also.

Hope this helps.

Aha, thanks for that. I had not seen that page before. I'll try that in the morning and report back if it works.

I am not sure there was ever much support for pcmcia devices in any OS. It may be possible to boot to pxe or floppy that could later help boot to pc card.

Hasn't worked, I'm afraid. I'm still getting an error (puppy_wary_5.5.sfs not found)

Thing is, there is an .sfs file, but not named puppy_wary_5.5. Should I rename it?

Floppy is out of the question unless it boots with a usb drive.
PXE is network boot, right? That may be easier as this has onboard 10/100.

OK, after some faffing around and finding out a cheat code for DSL, I managed to get that going and installed (didn't see that there was a space between 0x180, 0x386).

Although, it's not that great, I can't get my head around it.

Wary, using the code mentioned before, springs up some red and purple text, mentions a SCSI disk (?!) and waits for 60 seconds. It then loads drivers, and stops at the same error. "Puppy_Wary_5.5.sfs not found". I have tried this disk on a standard desktop, and it booted first time.

What do I do now? Oh, and I have no bootable floppy disk drives, just a USB one.