Unable to install Ubantu Sony Vaio will not boot from CD

[zakir]

Hello friends,

I have a Sony Vaio laptop with me,Which has an external PCMCIA connected CD drive and an external floppy.I have formatted the hard.Burned the latest version of Ubantu but although the CD spins during boot,which results nothing.The bios boot order is CD/Floppy/Hard Drive.When I put in a Smart Boot manager disk in the floppy,I get the application to run however, my CD drive is not listed as a boot option.I totaly clueless about this anybody here to help me out..

thanks in advance..!!

[Fabian]

I have done some findings on this bug,when the drive runs after booting with an inserted cd
sudo lsmod | grep cd which eventually gives me

cdrom 43168 1 sr_mod

whereas it has nothing of the kind when no cd was in the drive.So I appended
cdrom
sr_mod
to /etc/modules
IF I boot now without CD in the drive I get the following error ata2.0 failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) which seems to be a rather widespread error.The drive still is not working.So at this stage am gonna try to add 'irqpoll' as a boot option, which is reported to fix the xfermode error.

[T.J.]

It might because of the BIOS doesn't allow booting from the CD-ROM if it's really old, but it's more likely that the drive itself isn't bootable. The next step, short of the above, is to get a bootdisk.A good way to boot anything is to put GRUB on a floppy. GRUB is a bootloader that can boot Linux, Windows, GNU Hurd and others, as well as CDs.When the computer is booting, watch for a message like "F2 for setup" or similar to actually take you into the BIOS settings. Look at the boot order, and make any adjustments necessary to confirm the CD-ROM is higher on the list than the hard drive. Make sure the CD you're using is bootable, and try it.

[Maxforu]

Friend,Does your cd rom is on the boot priority list before the hard drive?
Alot of these laptop with built in floppies are configured as
boot0=floppy
boot1=ide
(IDE is the hard drive)
1)You should try to do this with your laptop.Enter your bios and access the BOOT Priority list now set the first boot device to CD(ROM)

2)Set the second boot device to IDE (or HARD DISK, or HARD DRIVE, or whatever your BIOS calls your hard drive) if you want to boot from the floppies.Set Floppy to 2nd and IDE (or whatever) to third

3) Save your settings and exit (in whatever method your BIOS requires).It is possible to disable the splash screen within the BIOS.