topic Re: USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately in PCs & Accessories

USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

Mils — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:51:42 GMT

I've just purchased a Vaio FS315s and wanted to use the usb / firewire ports to boot off an external drive.
The phoenix bios and Intel both say they have full support for this and their bios supports it but SONY have switched this OFF !!!! Does anyone know how to switch this back on?
SONY says its not available !!! So why not explicitly state the ports are only available via oprtating system?? My vendor, Comet won't take the laptop back and SONY hasn't given me a fix yet. Its a shame to have spent a £1000 for a dud laptop that has hardware that is deliberately switched off by SONY

Does anyone knwo how to create a bootable CD that will allow it to boot an external drive and run windows xp / 2000 off it?

ThanksUSB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

Re: USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

kee-lo_ — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:42:29 GMT

If you are lucky, you can get a floppy drive and use a USB boot disks some clever guy called Bart made (was it Bart?) I think you can find it on bootdisk.com

Re: USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

William — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 14:24:42 GMT

The only easy alternative option for booting is a USB Sony Floppy Drive and it has to be the Sony PCGA-UFD5 (unless there is a newer equivelant now).

Re: USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

Mils — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:50:32 GMT

Thanks for that info, but I need a bootable usb HD, are there any SONY USB drives that work with the Vaio?

Re: USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

kee-lo_ — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:11:42 GMT

No, not even their micro thingy does it.

The only thing you can do is try a utility like these : http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/