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Bootable PCMCIA CD-Rom drives?

CrackRabbit

CrackRabbit

Lifer
I was able to pick myself up a Sony Viao PCG-Z505SX laptop, but the hdd was wiped and it has no CD or floppy drive. Being a thin and light laptop the cd drive that came with it was a PCMCIA external drive, so to be able to boot the laptop and install Win2K on it I need another boot capable cd-rom. I have looked at getting one of the drives the notebook came with off of ebay (PCGA-CD5 / PCGA-CD51) but they tend to be rather expensive. Does anyone out there know of other bootable cd-rom drives I could get that would end up being less expensive?


Thanks,

CrackRabbit
 
As I recall, PCMCIA ports do not become active until real mode drivers are installed and running. Does this Vaio have a Firewire or USB 2 port? If so, that would be your best bet.
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
As I recall, PCMCIA ports do not become active until real mode drivers are installed and running. Does this Vaio have a Firewire or USB 2 port? If so, that would be your best bet.
Click to expand...

It has both, but neither are bootable options in the bios. There are certian drives that you can boot from without having to install drivers, at least I am pretty sure of that.
 
just get an adapter for an internal drive, USB to IDE.
those optical drives are ludicrously expensive, I'll grant you.
 
Originally posted by: Busithoth
just get an adapter for an internal drive, USB to IDE.
those optical drives are ludicrously expensive, I'll grant you.
Click to expand...

Yep! With a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter you can mount the 2.5" drive in an operating desktop machine and format the 2.5" drive and make it bootable. Then you can add the real mode drivers for your optical drive and go from there.

You could also copy the entire OS CD on to the bootable 2.5" drive. Put it back in the laptop, boot to it and then run the SETUP program from the HDD.

 
Found a way around it today, got a USB floppy drive and booted from it and was able to format the hdd to boot. Now I just need to wait for the cheap non bootable PCMCIA cd drive i bought of off ebay to arrive and I should be good to go.
 
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