USB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

[Mils]

I've just purchased a Vaio FS315s and wanted to use the usb / firewire ports to boot off an external drive.
The phoenix bios and Intel both say they have full support for this and their bios supports it but SONY have switched this OFF !!!! Does anyone know how to switch this back on?
SONY says its not available !!! So why not explicitly state the ports are only available via oprtating system?? My vendor, Comet won't take the laptop back and SONY hasn't given me a fix yet. Its a shame to have spent a £1000 for a dud laptop that has hardware that is deliberately switched off by SONY

Does anyone knwo how to create a bootable CD that will allow it to boot an external drive and run windows xp / 2000 off it?

ThanksUSB & FIREWIRE booting not possible or disabled deliberately

[kee-lo_]

If you are lucky, you can get a floppy drive and use a USB boot disks some clever guy called Bart made (was it Bart?) I think you can find it on bootdisk.com

[William]

The only easy alternative option for booting is a USB Sony Floppy Drive and it has to be the Sony PCGA-UFD5 (unless there is a newer equivelant now).

[Mils]

Thanks for that info, but I need a bootable usb HD, are there any SONY USB drives that work with the Vaio?

[kee-lo_]

No, not even their micro thingy does it.

The only thing you can do is try a utility like these : http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/