Sony Vaio PCMCIA CD ROM Drive

[SCompRacer]

I know someone who has a Sony Vaio Z505 superslim notebook with Win2000 Pro. Came without CD ROM, and Sony want's $300 for their PCMCIA CD ROM drive. She want's to save some money and knows you can pick up aftermarket PCMCIA drives for alot less.

Sony told her that other PCMCIA CD ROM drives are not integrated with the hardware in such a way that they will operate without a running OS. SO if you want to restore your system with the restore CD's, it won't work.

Is what Sony told her accurate?

[Topha]

i have no clue, but you could try to borrow a cd-rom from someone else and try it out.
sorry if im not a lot of help

[Kruzin]

Windows needs to be loaded for pcmcia sockets to work. You'll never get straight DOS support on a pcmcia CD drive.
Another option would be a generic lpt port driven CD drive, wich can support DOS. However, these are kinda slow...

[Wombat]

Sony may actually be telling the truth. I'll ask a few of my Vaio-owning buddies. I've never seen them using non-Sony drives. We're college kids, and would have saved the money if the could've.

[Taz]

Try these people http://www.freecom.de they do an external CD-ROM drive called the Traveller and a selection of cables for attaching it to a PC. The Sony laptop I've got has an iLink connector so I use their iLink cable which gives good performance and PnP installation.