Installing ubuntu on a laptop without . .

bwana

bwana

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an optical drive or the ability to boot from USB.

I've been given a Vaio to install ubuntu on - any suggestions?

My first thought was to rip the hdd out and use another pc. Is there anything I need to be wary of?
 
Well if you don't have an optical drive or floppy drive, and aren't able to boot from anything but a hard drive, then you don't really have a choice: you have to remove the hard drive!

But if there are other boot options, what are they?
 
I cannot believe that in this day and age people will make hardware like this, no USB boot option, no optical drive, no LAN boot, no floppy?

Then how on earth are you to install software that comes with a CD? "Rip" it to a desktop and network install? This is so backwards...

Anyway, your only option now will be to remove the hdd and either install Ubuntu on it or ghost an image to the drive with dd, tar, whatever you choose. If you can only get a minimal boot with CLi then you can mount an image from there and continue the install, but seeing you are going to butcher the device you might as well get everything over with before you put the drive back again.
 
The problem with USB booting lies with the device more than the BIOS. My netbook (Aspire One) refuses to boot off certain brands and/or sizes. Try boot of a small 256Mb or 512Mb drive first (try with DSL).

This is how I install Ubuntu on my netbook. Put a minimal install on 512 Flash Drive and mount the ISO on my main PC apache instance.
 
How about advising the owner not to do that?

You end up bricking the whole vaio Windows recovery thats built into it and devalue the laptop.
 
MyWorld said:
I cannot believe that in this day and age people will make hardware like this, no USB boot option, no optical drive, no LAN boot, no floppy?
Click to expand...
This is an old Vaio - pre 2003 as far as I can tell. It originally came with a external IDE optical drive, and probably a floppy too, but those have been lost long ago by the previous owner.
Drake2007 said:
How about advising the owner not to do that?

You end up bricking the whole vaio Windows recovery thats built into it and devalue the laptop.
Click to expand...
Considering the above I think it is fair to say there might not be a built in Windows recovery.
 
Aqua_lung said:
Have you tried a USB optical drive though? surely that will work.
Click to expand...
It works but not as a boot device. It only has the option to boot from IDE CD Rom in the bios.

I'm just going to rip and stick . . . when the power decides to come back on . . . or Monday.

Now here's my question - at what stage does it start detecting hardware and installing the correct drivers? Can I make the swop back to the Vaio at any time?
 
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What model is it?

No optical drive? Must be a C-series or old N-series.... If it's a C-series with a Transmeta cpu, ubuntu is going to struggle.
 
arf9999 said:
What model is it?

No optical drive? Must be a C-series or old N-series.... If it's a C-series with a Transmeta cpu, ubuntu is going to struggle.
Click to expand...
Its the sony pcg-5316 and it came preinstalled with Windows 2000.

Beyond that I cant tell you much.
 
That PCG model number is on the base of the unit. There should be a "sales" model number on the upper surface (next to the bottom right of screen or above the keyboard) number will be "PCG-<some letters> <some numbers>"

With that we can do some googling on the internets for a solution. It may be possible to reflash the bios.

edit: It sounds like a PCG-C1 picturebook. There is some info here: http://www.farstand.com/cgi-bin/pcg-c1/Forum.exe

edit2: here's a pic of one... Model number is bottom right of screen bezel. http://imgh-a.dena.ne.jp/exh2/20090213/59/118063675_1.JPG

edit3:... It seems that is a PCG-Z600 model. I've never seen one.... ah, I see it is similar to the z505 model. http://dynalabs.de/mxp/vaio/index.html . instructions to replace hard drive here: http://dougpile.com/computer/vaio/harddrive.html it may be worthwhile removing the hdd, installing the kernel after mounting on another PC and then trying again with hdd boot.
 
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