Sony Vaio Z600TEK CD Problems

[drunkahol]

I've just got round to re-installing my laptop and decided to put Fedora Core 2 on it. I've been using FC2 on my desktop for a while now and am most impressed.

The installation, however, was a bit of a nightmare as the laptop would boot from the CD-ROM, but then the linux kernel that runs the installation would not detect the CD-ROM.

Now I got round this by using

linux nopcmcia ide2=0x180,0x386 nofb noapm acpi

to boot the install kernel.

However, now that FC2 is installed and updated to the latest packages, I tried to install some extra packages from the CD's.

To my horror, the CD is not part of the system!

I have tried rebooting the laptop with the CD plugged in, and poking and prodding about.

Nothing however allows FC2 to see and configure the CD drive. This is despite the fact that the Memory Stick reader is properly configured as a removeable drive.

Can anyone help me? I know it's an old laptop, but surely it's not THAT old?

I have previously had this laptop working with dual boots of W2k and RedHat 9. The external CD was working under this setup.

Cheers

Duncan

[stiperstones]

I have had the same problem has you wit Sony Vioa 600TEK in the end i did a network install from the fedora 2 core rescue disk using the sony pcmia cd rom and did not issue any comands at the linux prompt the only things that do not work are the pcmia cd rom and sony pi still trying to figure it out.

[RobinMacharg]

Check your GRUB or LILO boot options. The ones you used to install the distro may have been copied across to your installation and be preventing certain devices from working. You should be able to reconfigure your boot loader to not use these. FWIW I've seen pci=off mentioned as a parameter to help installation, and I believe sound and network detection may also be affected by this. Might be worth checking your boot logs (in /var/log)?

[rgheck]

I've had similar problems with another VAIO model. In my case, the DVD drive is connected via firewire, and one needs to load the sbp2 module in order to see the drive. For some reason, this does not seem to be automatically detected by kudzu. Try running
#modprobe sbp2
There may be some dependencies you'll want to check, but those should be handled automatically.

See http://www.linux1394.org/sbp2.php for more information.