Installing on a system with no optical drive

[pentium]

I'm getting ready to take a trip to Japan later this year and I'm gathering up all my compact hardware for the trip (digital camera, DV camera, GPS and laptop because the less space used in my luggage, the more I can bring back ) I picked up two Sony Picturebooks (PCG-C1VN and a japanese PCG-C1XG/BP) last month and I want to get the better of the two, the C1VN, setup and ready. I decided on installing Windows FLP because XP was a bit too much for the system, 2000 was not able to run some of my software and Linux...well, I could run it but I'm on vacation to relax. Not to pull my hair out because half my hardware won't work.
Anyways, the system can be booted from the internal hard drive, a USB floppy drive or by using the Sony PCGA-CD51 PCMCIA cd drive. No other PCMCIA cd drive will work (and thankfully I did get the above CD drive).
So I pop in my FLP install disc and...it fails.
In fact, every OS disc I have tried failed at some point.
<-------Yes, I did try linux so don't say I didn't at least try.

Either the CD drive is not happy with the discs or the system is not allowing the discs to be used because it's not the restore CD that came with the unit (and is loaded with Windows ME....yuck!)
I tried shoehorning in a regular CD drive like I did when I was working on the ProGear tablet and that didn't work as the IDE chipset only allows for one device set as master and no slave.
I also tried dumping the install CD to a solitary partition on a hard disk and then booting from that which did work to a degree (I got a blinking cursor instead of "OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND") but still didn't work.
Then I went off to google to see what they could say.
There are supposedly a lot of people without the proper CD drive it seems.
Then I came upon this which looked very promising. It even included a picture of the listed steps working and a Liberetto installing FLP.
So I try it, managed to get up to step 10 but alas, I once again went from "OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND" to a blinking cursor and that's it.
I'm doing something wrong here but I don't know what. The usual ghost/disk cloning approach won't work with FLP either.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

hmm... it doesn't look happy with anything. any way to possibly flash the bios?

[Wizard]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

Grab a bootable CDR with tiny livelinux that is used to repair broken linux that goes all into ram, then use partitioner software and format it either NTFS (FLP) or if using Linux partition as needed and select 82 or suitable partition type and format them.

Remember to mark the bootable partition as bootable on that hard drive.

Cheers, Wizard

[pentium]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

There is no newer BIOS updates.
Here's something I never thought of. I guess clicking and dragging files is a lot dirtier on the filesystem than using xcopy and the command line. I tried again and strictly stayed in the command line and I got it to work!
Howevever FLP still insists cdfs.sys is corrupt and the install fails there.
I tested the disk and disc on a half dozen other laptops and they all worked fine so it's something about this Picturebook and only this Picturebook. When I tried the C1XG it actually booted right up to the installer and is installing as we speak. Hmm, I somehow have to make it not worry about that file if I'm going to make this work methinks.

[seanc]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

Have you run memtest on it?
Did you remember to set the drive as active?
Does it have a PXE capable NIC?

[NxB]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

It looks like a ram issue. Usually when it does this the chip is defective or the timings are too aggressive (if u can adjust at all). I've had this happen a bunch on XP systems, usually desktops. Every disk stops at a different point, freezes or gives a page fault.

You can try to load the setup from the HD but its likely gonna fail too.

[Scenic]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

agree with nxb. most of the time when i had problems when installing 2k/xp (corrupted files messages) it was a RAM issue of some sort.

either too aggressive timings (or an incompatible module) or a bad RAM stick..

i've seen laptops which worked perfectly fine with PC100 CL2 SD-RAM, but did exactly the same as you described with CL3 sticks (as they were running with CL2 which caused all sorts of weird problems)

[sofTest]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

I had a case where the recurring error message was a specific corrupt file. After some testing, I found that the HDD had a bad sector. After mapping that out, the install went smooth.

During install of OS, install files are copied to the same physical places on the disk on every attempt, and so any errors affects the same file(s) every time.

[pentium]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

Have you run memtest on it?
Did you remember to set the drive as active?
Does it have a PXE capable NIC?

1- Yes. I'm honestly hoping it's also wrong though as it's reporting issues in three separate locations (14, 46, and 85mb regions) and if I got bad ram I'm screwed as the eight Samsung K4S281632B-NC1L chips are soldered to the mainboard. The only thing that makes me think it's incorrectly reporting the ram bad is that the Memtest error count smashed through 1000000 (one million).

2- It's active

3- No

[NxB]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

as the eight Samsung K4S281632B-NC1L chips are soldered to the mainboard

Rework station makes it easy to switch ram chips. I HATE built in ram with a passion tho. The chips might just have cold solder too, all is not lost.

Also, any heat issues?

During install of OS, install files are copied to the same physical places on the disk on every attempt, and so any errors affects the same file(s) every time.

Different OSs would copy different files. Linux copies nothing but won't load. That has happened to me before with HDs though. I have one that I had to cut a large section from. The rest of the drive is relatively reliable.

[pentium]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

No heat issues and if I need to reflow I can't do it. The chip leads are too close together for me to do.
Actually, if I had bad ram it would explain why even the live cd was failing as live sessions are generally ram intensive. They can work with a hard drive to free up a bit of spae but yeah, if you got bad ram all sorts of funky things will happen. I'm optimistic that I can find replacement ram chips so I guess this is a write-off.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Installing on a system with no optical drive

If the same addresses of RAM come up each time you could use this Linux software to map out those regions, kinda like "bad sectors" but for RAM...

http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/