setting and booting off cdrom on a Sony Vaio
 

I have a Sony Vaio that won't boot off a cdrom, it goes right to Loading Windows.

I got into BIOS by holding down f2 and Bios is set to boot off cdrom, but it won't boot off a Bootable CD, The CD has been booted off of a number of times and it is a good CD disk

This laptop is Crashed Windows Laptop.

Hmm, try disabling the boot option for the hard drive and see what happens.

The bios won't let you do that , If you try to set 1st an 2nd as cdrom it will kick the hard drive to 1st boot device or visa-versa.

Oh wow. That's dumb... LOL. Are there any bios updates for it whatsoever?

And just out of curiousity, do you have any spare cd drives laying around? If I lived close to you I would let you borrow one of my, umm, 12? that I have? LOL

Maybe it 's like my acer where you have to enable Disk to Disk transfer in Bios.

Unless there's data on the drive you want to recover, just google factory restore.
Most laptops have a factory restore key.
Then install whatever you're going to install.

I did connect a Sony External usb drive and setup in Bios to Boot off external device, that didn't help either. I really do think Sony is pulling a Fast One here.

They would do anything to keep Linux off their computers.

I don't want to restore I want to boot off of cdrom and install Fedora 14 .

Which model is it? My sister got an old-ish Vaio and it can perfectly boot off Linux CD's and even off a Linux OS in the HD. I wonder if your PC is by any chance from the vpcea serie and if it's black or colored.

Sony Vaio PCG-7142L

Solved !!!
 

Problem Fixed.

What I did was remove SATA hard drive from laptop and put on my Fedora 14 PC and used gparted and removed crashed Vista partitions and put Fedora 14 on it.

Put back into Laptop and now it will let me Boot off of Cdrom.

The way Vista was installed on hard drive wouldn't let cdrom boot, only boot from hard drive.

Also found 7 dead keys on keyboard, will have to buy new keyboard, for around $60-70. someone must have beat hard on keys. Sure is a Cheap keyboard.

Connected external USB keyboard and now the computer works great.

Sweet man, glad to hear you got it working!

Nice to know that work around, there's a thread that I saw that stated that sony doesn't support usb boot.
Youshould mark thread as solved so others that have this problem can find the solution.