Full reformat, recovery

Removed hard drive. Followed steps found in:
http://www.sandersonforensics.co.uk/sony_vaio_pcg-z505sx.htm

Mounted in desktop PC with laptop-ide to ide adapter (Fry's). Slammed into pc with removeable hard drive tray.

DOS boot disk. fdisk. format d: /s /Z:16 (8K clusters).
fdisk again: set active partition so it can boot.

copied win98se install files to drive.

reinstalled into laptop.

booted. dos came up. ran win98se setup.exe.

ethernet hardware was found (thankfully!). Intel type.

Display driver was not found. Google searches. Tough to find drivers. Learned from the linux folks that this laptop uses the Neomagic 256AV chip. Finally found:

Video.zip on driverguide.com
http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=56988

Unzipped to tmp dir. Control panels, Display, Advanced, Adapter, Change. Navigate to the unzip dir. Works!

Now need the change monitor type from default to Laptop Display 1024x768. Then change resolution to 1024x768 to fix fonts that are jagged. When resolution matches the laptop display (both set to 1024x768), screen image is perfect :-)

Saved video driver and audio driver to Gmail account. Search "z505s".