Unable to boot from external cd drive

[meiyaps]

I have a Sony Vaio notebook computer. It doesn't have an internal cd drive. It has an external PCMCIA DVD drive and a USB CDRW drive. I happened to format the hard drive and now I have trouble installing any operating system on it. It won't recognize both the dvd drive and cdrw drive. I can only use the floppy drive right now. I tried to load the PCMCIA DVD drivers on a bootable floppy disk by adding the drivers to the "config.sys" file on the disk, but it just wouldn't load the drivers for some reason. Please note that I'll not only have to load the driver for the dvd drive but also for the pcmcia card. I don't have any drivers for the cdrw drive that can be included in the boot disk. Also, I have completely wiped out the hard drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

 

[kestrel1]

Are the drivers that you are using DOS drivers?
If you have booted with a floppy you could use the sys command to copy the system files from the floppy to the hard drive to make life a bit easier for getting the drivers to work:
sys a: c:
should copy the files & make your c: drive bootable. This way you can copy the drivers across to the hard drive & configure the drivers from there. Making things a bit quicker.

 

[thorswolf]

Kestrel has a good point.

You'll also need to do some of the old DOS stuff that us dinosaurs remember. You'll need DOS drivers for your PCMCIA card and you'll need to call those up in your config.sys file, also maybe some parameters for the memory address and I/O. If Sony's support site it worht its salt, you'll find the details there.

Then you'll have to load the CD-ROM drivers in config.sys (this is usually a .sys file) and you'll have to call mscdex.exe in the autoexec.bat file to be able to read from the CD-ROM.

Hope it helps