Missing Operating Systems

chavezychavez

Hey All,

Maybe someone could give my a bit of advice on the issue below. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I was given a Sony Vaio PCG-C1F a few years back that had Win98 running smoothly on it. One day I turned it on to get the message "Missing Operating System" pop up after the BIOS check. I left it for a while before going back to it, and at that stage, when I turned it on, it wouldn't even turn on. Therefore, it got thrown on the "Old Hardware" pile and was forgotten about until a few weeks ago when I came accross it again.
Out came the trusty screwdriver and after checking and reseating a lot of the connections, hey presto, its back working again, but unfortunately, only as far as the "Missing Operating System" screen.
The hard disk is being recognised by the BIOS, so I assume that the OS installation just got corrupt along the way.

My trouble with it as follows:

-- Its an early version of a netbook with no floppy/CD drive or network port.
-- It has a USB port, but the bios does not support booting from a USB stick.
-- From what I can gather however, it will boot from an Sony external floppy drive (which I am under the impression is plugged into the USB, though I may be wrong there). Of course I wasn't given this when I got the machine.

The BIOS does give the option of booting from Harddisk, CD or Floppy.

I've being trying to go down the route of using a U3 USB stick to simulate a CD boot drive but so far to no avail.

Has anyone ever experienced a conundrum like this before or have any suggestions on how I can get an OS on this system?
Is there even a method of getting an U3 stick to correctly mimic a CD (or floppy drive for that matter) at boot time?

ethernet

Network boot? Perhaps it's more practical to remove the hard drive, put it in an enclosure and connect it to another machine, install some OS onto it and put it back in the machine, with fingers crossed