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    Black screen with cursor at startup

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by vestasan, Oct 19, 2013.

  1. vestasan

    vestasan Notebook Consultant

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    Hello! Every time after cold boot or restart I'm getting cursor on black screen for about half a minute.
    That is very annoying... Can anyone help please? I have VPCZ2390X with Windows7.
    Thank you
     
    vestasan, Oct 19, 2013
    #1
  2. ngvuanh

    ngvuanh Notebook Deity

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    I think it's about SSD
     
    ngvuanh, Oct 19, 2013
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  3. lovelaptops

    lovelaptops MY FRIENDS CALL ME JEFF!

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    It's definitely an SSD-related issue.This may not seem very helpful, but there was quite a bit of discussion of this in threads of 2 years ago or so, either in the Z1 Owner's Lounge or a thread devoted to the Z1's RAID0 SSDs. You would probably do best to Google it and include notebookreview.com in the search term, as I don't know if I've see much about it elsewhere. I wish I could tell you exactly what was determined to be the cause and what some of the attempted fixes were,but it was a bit above my head technically. but from my recollection:

    1) It's a condition that worsens over time, specifically as the number of writes to the NAND chips increases
    2) There was never a single cause - nor a single fix - determined, but I'm pretty sure you could get things back to day-1 performance if you image the drives using Ghost or a similar imaging program, wipe the SSDs, break the RAID array, re-create a RAID-0 array and restore a Ghost-type image to the "sanitized" SSDs.
    3) There were a few adjustments to the boot settings in MSconfig that reduced some of the "blinking cursor" time
    4) It was not uncommon to have as many as 20-25 "blinks" of the cursor before the boot sequence began, though there was no consistency, and I'm quite certain the problem was worst with the Z11s that used Samsung SSDs, less so with the Z12 and Z13 refreshes, that used Toshiba chips.

    Yes, it is annoying! It takes away the fast-boot characteristics of SSDs. There was a "senior" member here who offered to walk me through the process of re-doing my RAID array and then fate was kind to me: I dropped and pretty much destroyed my Z11, which was covered by an ADH warranty, so I bought an open box Z13 at the time for, like, $800 and it is still giving great service and at most 2 "blinks" before boot sequence begins.

    Good luck!
     
    lovelaptops, Oct 21, 2013
    #3