Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on February 18, 2004, 08:38:34 am
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I recently came into the possession of a Sony vaio PCG-R600 HEK. It apparently had taken a bit of a knock and my friend was about to throw it away now that he has a new one. I told him to hand it over to me as I figured I might be able to do something with it.
Anyway the situation is this
1) CD Rom Drive doesn't work (The drive is actually on the dockstation not the laptop itself)
2) Windows 2K won't run. The bar moves all the way up and then it bluescreens and resets to black screen with Sony written on it.
3) The bios is locked. My friend has no idea what the password was. He seems to vaguely remember it being an animal of some sort (Helpful huh? :rolleyes: )
4) I've got an ethernet cable so I can connect it to my computer easily but since the computer is using W2K I don't have DOS to play around with and I've got no idea what.
5) I'd prefer to put windows of some sort on it so that I can play Freespace away from home but if I can't do that I really don't care what OS I manage to get working on the system.
6) I have a copy of both WindowsME and Windows 2K that I'm not doing anything with.
I'm thinking along the lines of using a very small footprint OS to boot up the laptop from a floppy and then use a network connection to copy either Windows CD to C: and then install from there. I'll quite happily go as far as fdisking the HD and dual booting if that will help.
Anyone got any ideas what I should do with it?
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[color=66ff00]Short the cmos pins to erase the password for a start.
[/color]
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I'd need to know where they are and which ones to short first. I've done it before on a desktop machine but I had the manual in hand for that. This time I've got the laptop and nothing else (I wasn't in time to save the recovery disks etc)
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Just remove the mobo's lithium battery, and put it back.
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What Venom said.
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Tried it. No effect. I'll try leaving the power disconnected for a while in case there is a capacitor somewhere that I have to let discharge.
Anyway any ideas for what to do with this thing once I've got the bios working?
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POOL!
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You've lost me :confused:
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well, without a working CD-drive your options are rather limited, really.try putting a DOS floppy in it and see what parts are still allive. if you had a CD drive you could use knoppix, but since that doesn't work, you'd be best of trying to run winME.
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You have several options available.
I'm sure it would make a nice doorstop. Or something to prop the short leg on the couch up with. Or as a blunt object to beat someone that pisses you off with.
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or you can do the old way and use floppys.
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A boot disk works fine. I know that most of the hardware works. I think my friend killed the W2K install trying to fix[//i] things after the cd drive stopped working when he dropped it
The problem with a boot disk is I don't know enough about DOS to make one which will allow me to use networking. If I can do even that much I'm 3/4 of the way there.
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Hmm. If I give you the bootable disk images and program from on my win2k cd, you might be able to activat the recovery console, which is in essence a DOS prompt.
But I don't know if you'd need the win2k install disk. Which I have, and is only about 80 MBs of data...
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Sure. I've got broadband and nothing better to do tonight :D
How do you want to handle the transfer?
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Hold on, when I have everything ready, I'll PM you.
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You could always use it as a really thick placemat.
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Seems a pity to wase a perfectly good (ish) laptop on that. Especially considering that the dodgy CD drive is on the dockstation and that the laptop therefore was designed to work without one.
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The ultimate rescue disk...http://www.menuetos.org/
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[color=cc9900]Menuet doesn't support NTFS though, which could cause problems if that's what the laptop is formatted in. Unless a complete low-level is going to happen anyway.[/color]
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make fedora network install disk
put fedora cd in computer on your network and allow FTP access to the drive
install fedora
Enjoy
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Ooh... laptop BIOS protection is ****in' insane. If you've taken all the batteries out and it's still got that password prompt, you've probably run into the same thing I did. Which means, basically, the thick placemat suggestion's probably the best one. Theoretically, there's some jumpers you can reset to wipe the BIOS back to factory settings, but unless you have a good layout of the motherboard it ain't gonna happen, and paying some repair guy to do it'll cost more than that hunk of junk is worth. I couldn't even find a jumper on the one I tried to password-crack.
If it did work afterward and you just neglected to mention that, then damn you, you lucky bastard.
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just randomly short out random circits around random chips :nod:
and isn't it 'pool' people shout when skeet shooting, I wasn't sure if it was that or pull or something
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...
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DAMMIT! Why the bloody hell did that never occur to me? That's exactly the sort of solution I'd do, too (well, actually, I'd find a way to short out all of the circuits at once and hope I don't cook anything vital. But I didn't even think to do that). Still one hell of a lot of trial-and-error, but eh.
And it's "pull".
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Do what I did and install Windows 95 completely from floppy :)
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you could dunk it in watter, thhat would short everything out, just give it a good week or two in a moderately warm place
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That'd also make sure it stayed shorted out in parts. Provided, of course, my nasty-ass water didn't calcify everything or eat through something important in the meantime. Also, since in order for the short-out to have an effect the thing would have to have its power source in, that strikes me as a quick way to get electrocuted.
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[color=cc9900]And to think, I was under the impression that laptops loved water.[/color]
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Actually, depending on how much you've ****ed with it, your average laptop should be pretty much watertight. Ports are iffy, but they seal the cases pretty well. They're also ****in' hard to crowbar open without breaking anything.
Guess it's a good thing they make 'em hard to kill, seeing how hideously overpriced they are and all.
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[color=cc9900]You seem to have forgotten about cooling vents. Fast track to the processor.[/color]
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Ah. There is that.
Don't think water'd hurt the processor itself too badly anyway. Whole deal's pretty much compartmentalized, you'd need to give a laptop a good soak for the water to bridge from the batteries to anything delicate, so while it'd act funky until you gave it time to dry out there wouldn't be a lot of permanent damage.. I'd worry more about the fan motors...
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[color=cc9900]I class dropping it in a bucket a good soak, myself.
I agree with you about the lack of permanent damage, though. I spilt squash into an old Toshiba Satellite's cooling port a good few times, with the end result just being the fumigation of the room with burnt-on flavouring. Worked fine afterwards, although it smelt for a while.[/color]
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Originally posted by Kazan
make fedora network install disk
put fedora cd in computer on your network and allow FTP access to the drive
install fedora
Enjoy
Sounds like a nice enough idea. I'll give it a try :D
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There's always Knoppix.
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[color=cc9900]If he can access a CD drive over the network, yes. Getting there is a different matter.[/color]
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I've followed Kazan's advice and I've got the CD images downloaded (I didn't burn them yet I just mounted them with Daemon tools instead) and I've booted up the laptoop using the install disk.
The only problem is that I'm a bit stuck what to do next. The only options that aren't local are NFS Image, FTP and HTTP.
The only problem is that my main machine isn't running a HTTP or FTP server and I've got no idea how to use NFS.
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i can't help you, but i think that linux offers basics for running servers, i am completely geussing here, but if you have a knoppix disk handy it might be worth it to sniff around it's network utitlities.
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what I'd do is completly format the thing, put DOS on it, and use it as a "DOS console" to play old games.
Oh yeah, I'd definitively do that.
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I think I may be able to set up a HTTP server and use that. :)
I thought XP had an FTP server built in somewhere (turned off by default of course). I guess I must be mistaken cause I couldn't find it.