I received a tiny Sony vaio picture book pcg-c1vp, and it is running gruelingly slowly windows xp professional. My idea was to load a linux build on it that used few system resources, long story short though, I can't get this laptop to boot from anything but the hard drive.

it does not recognize usb boot devices, ie boot thumb drives, or my usb dvd burner. It does not recognize a bootable sd card, and as a last resort i bought a 3rd party pcmcia cd drive and it dosn't boot from it either.

I have disabled the hd in the boot menu, and loaded as the secondary ide controller the settings for both removable atapi drive and cd drive, but when the system boots it just gives me the message "operating system not found". it should be noted that when i receive this error, reset and go back into the bios my secondary ide controller is set to none, as if the bios couldnt detect anything with the settings i gave it so just reverted to blank.

I thought to upgrade the bios but the bios flash utility from the sony vaio website dosn't work, it just gives me the error: "PheonixPhlash Error File open failed on PLATFORM.BIN press any key to exit"

Possible problems i could see just from the boot aspect is that maybe it won't boot off a 3rd party cd drive? I tried multiple booting cd's, and none worked, maybe i need to shell out $50 for a sony pcmcia drive.

Basicaly I need help with either getting the bios upgraded so it can boot from something, or getting this bios to boot with something, OR somehow setting up a bootable linux (like puppy linux) on the hard drive which from there i could use to delete windows.

any help is appreciated, i'm just about out of ideas.

Replace the hard drive and see if the laptop will boot from the CD/DVD. Most laptops will automatically boot from the CD/DVD first. Reset the bios to remove what you have changed

do you mean remove the hard drive from the ide controller config? ill give it a try, but i have already disabled it as a boot device, and dont know how to actual remove the hard drive physicaly on this tiny laptop if that is what you mean. If i could remove the hard drive then i could try to install the os from another system, so if anyone knows how to do that either would be helpful.

The problem isn't getting it boot to the cd drive as much as getting the bios to even recognize that there is a cd drive. if I hit esc during the bootup theres even a boot to menu, it just dosnt do anything if i select one of the other 2 options: "removable media" or "atapi cd-rom"