Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
*sighs*
One of my VAIO Zs has essentially suffered catastrophic failure with a few issues cropping up. Anyone care to give a guess as to what's going on? I realize it might seem a bit long but this is a $2k machine is only 1.5 years old.
Warranty has expired back in November 2012 but I still have my CC for warranty purposes until November 2013.
My issues are about charging problems and SSDs failing.
VAIO Z VPCZ212GX (Quick specs: i5 2410m/4GB DDR3/128GB [64GBx2 in RAID0])
1. Charging issue - battery is not charging regardless of what I attempt to resolve it .
I already updated to the latest BIOs where it claimed to fixed a VAIO problem where it wouldn't charge intermittently. That did nothing.
Tried the commonly recommended method across the VAIO line of laptops when the battery is not charging -tried removing it, left it out for an hour, pressed power button to discharge any residual power and put it back in. It has not fixed itself. Repeated that a few times. Blew some air to clean contacts to no avail.
Tried my sheet battery, doesn't change anything, simply drains the sheet and I'd have to recharge it with its own charger. Main battery will not charge and is stuck at 85%.
Tried charging from my PMD and my other Z's series charger, still not charging.
Tried fresh install of windows, still doesn't charge.
Used an image of my other VAIO and its recovery partition, still doesn't charge.
2. SSDs failing - BSODs indicative of failure, can't restore/use PC intensively - this issue appeared shortly after the charging problems. Not sure if it's related.
a)"Operating System not found" - this has occured many times during the restarts - it is guaranteed to appear after I BSOD when attempting to recover from the recovery partition on the drives (below for more details).
b) I've tried using the ALT+F10 recovery method, it seems to start out great until a random interval when it's installing the drivers/apps, I get a BSOD code 0x000000F4 ( which seems to be indicative of SSD failure across the web)usually during install after the system restarts itself (it's supposed to). Tried doing that 6 times. BSODs arbitrarily at different points and I can't restore from the preinstalled recovery partition. On to fresh clean install.
c) Fresh clean install - installs just fine! But I've barely used any space on the SSDs nor have I installed Intel RST drivers yet. So that remains to be seen if it was stable in the first place. Why? Because subsequently, I realized I had a fresh recovery image that I had saved on my home server when I first received the laptop! Loaded the recovery image onto my portable SSD drive and began the recovery process.
It seemed successful and Intel RST said everything was alright. I decided to 'Verify' my RAID volume, and what do you know? System hangs and I get the wonderful BSOD code 0x000000F4. So really, I can't even get a full detailed analysis from Intel RST. The only value I got after booting the computer up after a couple of Operating System not found) was 'Blocks with Media Errors: 9129'. That's not so good, is it?
Ran HDTune to scan for errors...that didn't work out so well as it was initially fast (300MB/s + scan speeds) for the first couple of lines in green then it got progressively slow and reached a minimum range around the 70MB/s region before it froze/crawled to a halt and just brought about another BSOD with that dreadful F4 code.
I repeated this with the recovery partition of my working VAIO Z (*knock on wood*). Same bloody problem when I tried to verify the SSD volume nor can it charge my laptop. It's been running with the AC adapter all the time.
Anyhow, am I correct to say the SSDs are failing and need replacement? This is giving me a major migraine.
EDIT: Added in some stats/numbers from my diagnostic attempts.
VAIO Z2 (2011 Z) diagnostic - SSDs failing and charging issue?
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by Dev1ant, Jul 12, 2013.