Bios Recovery -- VPC-Z11SGX/S

Can someone point me to instruction for recovering a Z11 bios? My machine is stuck at the post/splash screen. The Bios is by Insyde and I have tried a number of key combinations but there is no beeping or additional activity on the screen to indicate that it is reading the USB/CD/Floppy with the Bios files.

Can someone confirm the key combination used by Insyde/Sony to initiate the recovery process?

Is the naming of the bios file on the media important? Does it need to be BIOS.xxx? Which extention (ROM/FD/BIN)? I unpacked the .exe from sony and extracted the ROM.

Has anyone recovered a new Vaio-Z from a bios problem?

Longer Version...

I was interested in trying to load OSX on the machine so I followed the steps to mod the bios in order to get access to the AHCI settings. Everything related to the bios mod went well, no problems. The machine was working after the flash for a number of reboots. However, at some point it stopped booting past the initial sony splash screen. This may have been the result of changing BIOS settings but I wasn't fiddling with anything exotic (IDE and Graphics only). I tried resetting the Bios by unplugging the battery. I have also been trying endless key combinations to try to get it to recover the bios from a USB flash stick to no avail.

Any suggestions on recovering this? Could it be something other than the bios? Am I resetting the CMOS correctly by unplugging the small cable connected to the battery in the lower left hand corner?

Thanks for any help. Post for additional information if it is needed.

 

open your laptop, disconnect sata devices, go to bios set raid mode.

 

Interesting...I'll give this a try. Just to be clear, I'm not currently able to access the Bios. I only get as far as the post/splash screen. However, I think you're suggesting that the sata devices could be interfering with post so I'll unplug them and see how it goes. Thanks

 

right, since it seems that you have messed up raid/ide/ahci setting, your laptop is stuck initializing your ssds. this happened to someone elsewhere in this forum, unplugging ssds made him his way back into the bios again to revert back to a working config.

 

This laptop gets very finicky when you switch to AHCI mode and start messing around with GUID partition layouts. I suspect it wasn't tested properly by Sony since the unit was always designed to ship with RAID.

Like Pyr0 said, disconnect SSD's...power on while they are still disconnected, and switch back to RAID mode. Then reconnect your SSD's and reinstall WINDOWS

 

Well there are units shipped with a HDD... those arent in RAID though, maybe it's something else?

 

It's certain partition layouts that the bios puke on in AHCI mode. I believe even the HDD units ship with the controller set to RAID mode.

 

You are right. My VPC-Z11 (HDD) has the controller set to Raid.

 

I just wanted to report that this did indeed solve the problem. Thanks Pyr0 for the suggestion. I'm not sure how people are running this in AHCI for the purpose of installing OSX but it's definitely not working for me.

@ Pyr0 -- I noticed in your sig above that you have your 330m overclocked. What software are you using to do that? That's a pretty significant boost to the core clock...any stability problems? Thanks

 

EVGA Precision, NVidia System Tools, MSI Afterburner are a few. I personally use EVGA precision which i like because you can save profiles then set them to hotkeys, have an OSD with customizable information, among other things. Just remember, in order to OC, you must be on external power

I have mines OCed to 615 core, 1353 shader, 800 memory stable. It's not that crazy considering a regular 330m is clocked at 575 core, 1265 shader and 790 memory. However, there is talk that the 330m in the Z is actually a slower model of the 330m, don't quote me on that though, but the 330m in the Z does OC quite beautifully from it's stock clock of 475, 1045, 700.