Trying to install Fedora 14 on a Stubborn Sony Vaio

[les]

On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 14:52 -0500, Jim wrote:
> On 02/21/2011 02:33 PM, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> > --- On Mon, 2/21/11, Jim<binarynut at comcast.net>  wrote:
> >
> >> A Sony Vaio will not let me boot on
> >> cdrom with a Crashed Windows OS,
> >> trying  to install Fedora only on laptop. Even if I
> >> have BIOS set to
> >> boot off Cdrom.
> >>
> >> I even hooked a external cdrom to usb and enabled in Bios
> >> to be first
> >> boot device, won't work,  in all cases it  will
> >> only Attempt to Load
> >> Windows.
> >>
> >> It won't even let you disable hard drive in Boot process.
> > This may be a stupid question, but have you checked the ORDER of the chosen boot devices in BIOS?  If the hard drive is first in the boot chain, even if the CDROM drive is set as bootable, BIOS will stll go to the hard drive first to boot the system regardless of a bootable CD being in the CDROM drive.
> >
> > B
> Done that, cdrom is first boot device, and hard drive is second boot device.
> 
> I think this is a Vista install and Sony has the laptop bootup setup to 
> bootup  on a path to Windows on hard drive. and ignores the cdrom.

Most laptops today prompt you to push a function key to get access to
the boot menu.  

If there is no message on the screen, try pressing F12 repeatedly during
the boot process.

Regards,
Les H