Solution: Sony Vaio PII Laptops that hang on boot.

I aquired a Sony Vaio F350 (PII 366 Mhz 128 Megs) and it worked great for about a month. Then it would randomly shutdown. Eventually it would not even boot. I got frusterated and threw in in a box with other junk.

Last week while trolling around the internet I came across a site after I googled for "sony vaio" "random shutdown" (I don't have the link handy right now), I found the fix. Basically the problem is with almost all vaio's with the PII mobile chips. Intel had a bug report on their site about it and sony had a thing about it too. I found a site that said they could fix the problem for 150$, to me that was steep being the value of the laptop isn't much more than that.

The site I found said the problem was a thermal problem or a capacitor problem. Several people had removed some bad capacitors and replaced them. I'm good with a solder iron but not good enough I wanted to waste several hours and possibly cook the cpu. The other solution was to get windows 98 installed and follow some steps to disable some apm management. As the harddrive was dead and I used knoppix only on this laptop that was out of the options.

Then I found a tiny little link called fix for linux.

All this link had was a boot option listed.
amp=off no-hlt
to adapt for knoppix my boot string was

knoppix dma apm=off no-hlt

and badabing badaboom it worked. It will even work without the apm=off string.

so to boot all sony vaio's with the random shutdown problem under linux (also works for ILUG, LinuxCare, RedHat, Mandrake, & Slackware) type no-hlt along with any other boot parameters.

Now I'll be getting a harddrive, for this one and a second battery and bump it up to 192 megs of ram and it'll be good as new :-D. Any suggestions on a wireless 802.11g card for it as well?

Other things with this laptop is I have used the linuxant driver for the winmodem (hcf/hsf), very easy & straight forward to install.
DVD's also play very well now, Some time during Dec. I posted a question about choppy DVD's. The solution was to use "hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc" to enable DMA for the DVD drive. This also worked on my FX300 (PIII 1Ghz 512mb Ram.

~ryan