Can I rejig VPCZ12N around SSD dying?

My 3+ year-old Z12 has died.The original C-drive SSD is no longer visible/available. The other 3 128GB are. I've wiped them clean, hoping to get one accepted as a new C drive - no luck so far (apart from formatting it and labelling it C; along with the other 2 as D & E).

The fan is also quite noisy, so it would be nice to renew this at the same time.

I would like to get the Z12 working again, with just the 3 still-working SSDs.

There is an X Drive, which I think may be the original restoring setup. It does have a Windows folder on it.

My rescue disks don't get any action. I got the message: "The system image restore failed. Error details: A data disk is currently set as active in BIOS. Set some other disk as active or use the DiskPart utility to clean the data disk and then retry the restore operation. (0x80042406)"

I would appreciate guidance as to whether what I would like to do is even possible; and then how best to do it. Would I be right in that it would probably be best to strip it down and physically replace the defunct C SSD with one of the others (on the basis that the BIOS is physically looking at that slot)?

 

Re-jigging Failed C Drive SSD
Fellow forum members may wish to know that I have managed to re-jigg my Z12's failed C drive SSD to get around this catastrophe.

I had naively thought that I could just open up the Z12, identify the 'C' SSD and switch it for one of the other still-functioning 3 SSDs. I'd failed to just re-label one as the 'C' drive.

Alas, when I opened up the Z12, I found that the SSD sub-unit had all the SSDs soldered in; they were not removable.

However, it turned out that this sub-unit is in fact made up of two boards, screwed together in a sandwich. So it is possible to switch the top and the bottom boards around, so switching the order of the SSDs. And thus one of the good SSDs became the new 'C' drive.

I then simply used the previously made Rescue DVD to restore the Z12 to its factory settings and all is working as new, albeit with only 3 SSDs instead of 4 (but in fact enough memory for my purposes).

 

Hi

I'm having the same problem with my son's almost 4 years old Z11. When I boot, the Intel boot utility lists the 4x64GB drives as 0,2,3,4 (has it always been those numbers? Don't remember.)
One of them (#2) has been listed in red with an Error, but I can boot the computer normally.

Some programs don't work, such as Skype, Leauge of Legends and some other games, but Firefox works ok and the OS is working flawlessly. I was able to make a full backup using the Windows backup program and I also made a backup from the Recovery DVDs. No read issues while making those backups.

I can also copy a large 2GB file so writing seems to work ok too, at least sometimes.

This morning, drive #0 was also listed in red with an Error, but other than that, the OS works as usual. And I could install PCMark7 and run a benchmark which accesses the drive, successfully.

What's going on? Is this a normal degradation process for these drives? My next step will be to try to rebuild the raid array, but if i do that, aren't the chances prettty high that this will happen again within a week or two?

Can it be a bad connection? I opened it up for fan greasing ~1 month ago. Perhaps I'll just need to re-attach the connection to the drives or MB?
Is it the drives that are failing? And what are the chances of 2 drives failing within a few days?
How are the failing? Are they out of GC headroom?

I'd rather avoid having to buy a new laptop now since I've bought 2 Vaios to the family over the past 6 months...