Sony VAIO VPCZ13: Slow boot after install of HDD

Hi

I own a Vaio VPCZ13C5E which normally comes with an 128 GB SSD and an optical drive. I bought it at the German outlet store few weeks ago.

Yesterday, I replaced the optical drive with a caddy adapter having an Samsung HM641JI HDD built in. No changes have been done to the setup of the vaio.

I bought the adapter at digizon's ebay store:

SATA 2nd Hard Drive caddy Adapter Sony VAIO VPCZ122GX/B | eBay

Now, when i boot the laptop, it keeps waiting for approx. 70 seconds in the BIOS screen. After that, Windows 7 (I'm using the out-of-box installation) starts booting but it is also incredibly slow. Until the logon screen it takes another 120 seconds or more. Before installing the boot time was less than 30 secs...

When I log in and test the i/o performance of both the SSD and the HDD everything seems fine. The SSD has an transfer rate of approx 250 MB/sec and the HDD round about 80 MB/sec. IMO both values are looking good.

Any ideas what could be wrong? Since I have no other issues once the system is up, my guess is that there must be something wrong on the BIOS or on Windows setup.

Thanks

dama

 

First things first:

Check the boot order/priority in the BIOS. Maybe it is trying to boot from the new HDD.

While you're in there, disable boot from network and usb as well.

 

No luck. Network and external devices boot are disabled. Boot order is as follows

1. Internal device
2. Optical drive
3. External device
4. Network

When I enable RAID configuration and go into it (CTRL-I), I see the following devices

0: SSD (part of RAID)
1: Samsung HDD (non-RAID)
2: SSD (part of RAID)

Within the BIOS there almost nothing else I could change: date/time, show raid config, enable/disable VT, boot order. No possibility to define what the "internal device" should be.

Any other suggestions?

 

Which internal device? You can choose between the two that you have installed.

 

I don't see any option in the BIOS which would allow to specify the "internal" drive. I have the standard BIOS installed (i.e. no advanced menus patched)

 

Ok, I found the cause for the problem. It seems that the Samsung HDD that was monted in the new adapter was causing the long time outs. I used it for several days in the Vaio and from time to time I could hear it clickling during the boot phase. Very strange - all the time before it was working perfectly in an external USB drive.

I exchanged it temporarily by a Crucial C300 and everything is working fine now! Booting from scratch again within 15 secs...

The question now is which HDD will be compatible with my Z13? It should have 500GB capacity or more. Any sugggestions or experiences? The C300 SSD is designated for my desktop...

 

I'm not very experienced in this kind of stuff, but it could be that the different types of drives are confusing the BIOS - it doesn't know which driver to load for each device.

Can you temporarily change both drives to HDDs and see if that makes a difference?

 

I've read before that certain drives could NOT get proper power from the ODD port.

 

Yes, but at least in Europe Sony was offering Z series with HDD only. Those models didn't had an ODD. I'm preatty sure that the HDD is connected to the same SATA port as the ODD in my model.

Is anybody here being able to look up which HDD model is used originally?

 

My VPCZ115GG has a HDD (the SSD version was too steep for me). No optical drive whatsoever, though.

The HDD is Toshiba MK5056GSY 500GB SATA.

Can you try one thing? Delete the partitions on the HDD, create an extended partition, and create logical drives in that partition. That will make the drive incapable of booting an operating system. Let's find out if the delay you are facing is because the BIOS is evaluating the drive to see whether or not it has an operating system installed on it or not.

 

Not the case. HDD models from the factory do not use the SATA port designated for the ODD drive.

 

I don't believe that this was just a BIOS issue. Of course, if there would be an o/s installed on the HDD, this could be the reason for the long delay within the BIOS. But there is nothing - I used the drive in an external drive enclosure with only one data partition (without an os installation)

But I don't like to use the Samsung HDD in my laptop anymore because of the loud clicking noise. I don't like to brick my laptop... that's why I asked for the originally HDD model built in.

Thank you for your help.