AlterNet: GONSALVES: 'The Tyranny of Choice'?
Thanks to Boing Boing once again.
I'm pretty sure I'm a maximizer. Do you agonize over choices or do you go with "good enough?" An interesting read, even if the original article is a stupid pay article.
R505GCP and booting from firewire - www.ezboard.com
I bought the PCG-R505GCP VAIO subnotebook from my friend Dan for a very good price. Dan's would make a pretty bad used car salesman, because he actually gives good deals.
I was so excited to have this new notebook. It's very light, battery life is fantastic, and it's speedy. Everything I wanted, and I didn't want to pay for the overpriced dock that Sony sells with the thing to get CD/Floppy access.
Every time you get a used computer, it's not a bad idea to reinstall the Operating System. This one was in fine condition, but there were a few missing admin tools that I wanted back. So I decided to play with Partitions and Recovery methods and in short, blew up the computer. All partitions ended up deleted and the machine was a $600 paperweight.
Hopefully this mini-article (I call it a "How To Not" as opposed to a "How To") will show up in some search engines so others out there won't go through the agony I did with this thing. My first piece of advice is DO NOT think you can boot from Firewire. The ONLY firewire device you can actually boot from is the dock CDrom (which actually is a firewire device) or some other very proprietary Sony devices. I attempted using a Sony external DVD burner, to no avail, along with three other external Firewire devices.
Don't bother trying to boot from Firewire, it is impossible, even though the BIOS says 'boot from i.LINK.' A sham, I tell you! The best you can do without the dock is to get your hands on a USB floppy device and load DOS and then the Firewire drivers. Sounds fun, no?
Even better: you can only boot from certain Sony USB drives. They cost $80. You have to get the VAIO specific bootable floppy drive. Good luck finding that even on ebay for less than $60.
A nice little workaround is some older TEAC USB floppy drives are bootable. I have one sitting in front of me, model number FD-05PU. Unfortunately, it's hard to find these, since the one I have at least is an iMac version (go figure a Mac product will work with a Sony, the most stubborn product on the planet).
Unfortunately nothing promises to work with this thing. My suggestion is to go to your local computer geek retailer, make sure they won't charge or deny you if you try to return something, and buy a USB floppy drive. If it works, huzzah, that's how you're going to have to reinstall. If not, return that shit and grumble.
Oh, and another thing. Attempting to network boot using Microsoft Windows RIS is also an exercise in futility. The Network Card in the VAIO is proprietary and you need special drivers, and RIS can't make a valid image out of the Sony Windows XP cd. Go figure.
Chalk it up to a run-in with the company that makes some of the world's coolest products but has the world's worst support.
