philani wrote:
made a friend a copy on a USB stick, Changed the boot order on his Sony VAIO to external drive. On boot up I get the Blue screen with Manta then Navigatrix.net with flashing dots. then a flashing grey screen and the error message reads
(initramfs)unable to fid a medium containing a live file system
Both the flash sticks works just fine on my HP notepad
Any suggestions greatly appreciated
What a bummer....the expectation, the anticipation, and then the "seconds to go" let down.
Obviously something is failing in the boot process. Unfortunately, aside from computers being notoriously stupid machines that hate humans a variety of other causes will toss this error. This is compounded because Sony Vaio have a reputation for doing things their own way.
Essentially the instructions to make it go don't all make it to the parts that make it go.
The machine follows boot instructions like a blind cab driver. After the second left followed by the sharp right three blocks down it come to a dead end and reports back "You can't get there from here."
In your case it could be a mismatch between the BIOS settings and the information on the stick. Possibly it thinks it's looking for a external HDD and the machine reports back "But this is a stick!"...or it's looking for a bootable stick, but reports as HDD (CD...whatever).
I don't have a Vaio to get my hands on so I'm poking in the dark but the BIOS settings for USBs vary from machine to machine. Sometimes they even depend on how the USB ports are hard wired to the motherboard.
For example, some machines make no distinction in USB ports. Some make a distinction if the device is a stick; a CDROM; or a HDD. Some will only boot a stick if the BIOS is set to external HDD and the hard drive controller is changed from IDE to AHCI.
....and for other machines <sigh> when all the flurry of alphabetical possibilities is exhausted some people found because of the way their machine was wired trying to boot from the right side USB port gives the error, booting from the left side USB port it works correctly....or the other way around.
Take a stab in that direction and when I get back to civilization I might be able to find a Vaio to have a proper look....unless someone else has better access to solve this problem.
