VPC-Z2 SSD dying or mybe virus?

Hi everyone,

I have a VPCZ21V9E, which I bought in December 2011. It has been working flawlessly since then, but a few days ago BSODs started to appear and some strange things happened.

It all started when I was reading Engadget and suddenly the page changed to a grey background and a fake Windows error message stating that I have a virus and I should press OK to scan my computer (this was some malicious webpage that I was somehow redirected to). I immediately closed Firefox and started a virus scan with McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.8 Patch 3. I left the virus scan do its work, but when I returned, I saw a BSOD and the fan was running on 100%. I kept the power button pressed to turn off the computer. When I restarted it, I was shown the "Operating System Not Found" message, so I turned it off again, back on, then Windows started, chkdsk ran and everything seemed normal. After that I didn't use the laptop for 1-2 days.

Today, I wanted to back up all my data to an external HDD, so I tidied up my internal SSD a bit and started copying stuff over. It all went well, until a BSOD appeared again and the fan started running on 100%. The message was KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR. Turn off -> OS not found -> turn off -> Windows started. I continued copying over my data, but the process always stalled at some place (I had the feeling that it tended to stop at certain files) and subsequently I encountered BSODs (KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR and "A process or thread crucial to system operation has unexpectedly exited or been terminated.") or different error messages (IAStorIcon.exe ..., Windows has encountered a critical error and will shut off, "VESMgrSub.exe: The instruction at ... referenced memory at ... The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of 0xc000000e.") and after them BSOD. Each time the system would become unusable, either the screen would blink first or immediately a BSOD would be shown. After restarting, the same OS not found message appears and Windows can be started only on the second try. Chkdsk would not run always. When the VESMgrSub error was shown, I was returned to the Windows logon screen, I clicked OK on the error message, entered my password and after that nothing happened: My user icon and the password field disappeared, but the desktop was not shown, only a black screen popped up for a moment every 3-4 seconds.

I included some screenshots. I tried analyzing the minidumps, but there were none, even though they are turned on in the advanced system settings. The event viewer shows only error messages about the fact that the system was shut down unexpectedly.

If I were not redirected to that fake virus website in the beginning, I would have thought that my SSD is dying. Do you have any idea what the problem can be? Any advice? I'd be grateful for any help!

Thanks a lot!

 

IF you have restore point enabled on your system try restoring to a time before this problem surfaced. If that doesn't work, looks like the virus is messing up your system files. Download malwarebytes latest version and install it with full 30 day trial. Then do a complete scan there should be several malware infections on your pc.

 

Thank you for the reply!

In the meantime I managed to successfully run some anti-virus/-malware programs with following results:
Windows MRT: 1 detection, but did not seem serious (meanwhile McAfee caught something in a temp directory)
Malwarebytes: 6 detections, 1 false positive, 2 most probably false positives, and 3 apparently minor things in a temp directory
Spybot S&D: many detections, but only cookies, nothing interesting
McAfee Virusscan Enterprise 8.8: the full scan completed with no BSOD and no detections.

From VAIO Care I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostics and it found no errors. Afterwards, I did the hard disk test and the surface scan test reported an error and told me to run Chkdsk to fix/remap the bad sector. After the test completed, a BSOD appeared again. I restarted the computer and the Intel RAID config screen showed up, saying that one of the 2 drives has failed. Within a few seconds, to my surprise, Windows loaded up, but there Intel RST also showed that one of the SSDs has failed: "Array_0000: Volume0: Failed. Details: Your volume appears inaccessible. Try fixing any problems reported on the array disks. If this fails, review ... Disk on port 0: Failed". The strange thing was that I could normally use Windows. I clicked on "Reset disk to normal" in Intel RST and the error message went away.

I will do a factory restore on my laptop, but do you think that I should take it to Sony so that they replace my SSD? (In 1 month I will travel to Asia for a longer period of time and there I won't have warranty)

 

I tried running the HD Tune benchmark. It started at 175 MB/s, then stalled, speed went down to 0-40 MB/s, then climbed to 450 MB/s, after which an error message popped up saying that the test was aborted due to a read error, and finally the usual BSOD was shown.

 

A short update:
Hard Drive Sentinel showed that the drives are 100% OK. I do not have the full version, so I could not run a surface scan, but I used HDDScan instead. As expected, the result was a BSOD. I started the VAIO system recovery by pressing ALT+F10 on boot. Around 40% I got an error message that the process cannot be completed, and I had to restart the laptop. The RAID manager popped up saying that my RAID array has failed. Since then I cannot start the recovery console using ALT+F10 anymore, and I obviously only see the OS not found message.

I reset the RAID array, started the recovery console from the recovery USB stick, formatting froze on 4% and after a few minutes the same error message was shown as before. I think the only option left is to take it to the local Sony certified service center... I'm lucky that I bought the 2-year warranty extension, because my basic warranty period ended 2-3 weeks ago.

 

You definitely have SSD issue.

 

Thanks a lot for the confirmation, ngvuanh! Initially I was thinking that maybe a virus messed up my system, but it was probably just a coincidence.

 

Even though, all symptoms you described here are related to defective SSD, let give it last chance.
If you have recovery DVD, enable Show RAID at boot and press Ctrl-I to delete and rebuild RAID.
Then try to run recovery DVD.

 

I already tried that (that's what I meant by resetting the RAID array in post #5). After I deleted and re-created the RAID array, I started the recovery console from the USB stick, but the same error appeared as before.

I gave it one more try now, and strangely the Intel RAID manager showed that the disks are not in RAID, even though I'm sure I created a RAID array the last time (in the recovery console I saw a ~250GB volume as well).
Nonetheless, I created it again, ran the recovery and now it completed successfully and it is currently installing the drivers... I was planning to take the laptop to the service center tomorrow, now I don't know what to do. I'll run some SSD tests to see what happens.

 

So, the system restore was successful, everything was set up correctly, I installed all possible updates (200 Windows Updates, Vaio Update, etc.) and everything seemed fine. Strangely, I had a newer Vaio Care version before I reinstalled everything. The current one looks different and has no hard drive scan. It didn't find any available updates

I downloaded HD Tune, ran the performance test, which completed successfully with 480 MB/s max, 700 something MB/s burst, but also lots of downward spikes and a minimum of 2 MB/s.
I ran the error scan as well. Around 10-15%, HD Tune stalled, it was not responding, later on continued, but after a few percents, all the other sectors (the remaining ~75%) became red and after about a minute the usual BSOD was shown and after the restart, I got the OS not found message. I tried making screenshots of the HD Tune results. I managed to save the performance results, but the file cannot be opened now. The error scan screenshot couldn't be saved at all. I entered a file name, but I got the message that the file C:\...\xyz.png does not exist.

I'm taking the laptop to the service center tomorrow.

Thanks for the replies ngvuanh and next4nextel!

 

I took the Z2 to an authorized VAIO service center and got it back in less than a week. They changed the SSD under warranty and now everything looks fine (I'm setting up the laptop currently).
I was hoping that they'll put a Gen 3 SSD in it, not the "outdated" Gen 2, but I wasn't that lucky I got an MZRPA256HMDR-000SO. I hope this one will last longer...

 

1.5 years have passed since my SSDs were replaced, and the end of my extended warranty period is approaching, so it was high time for my SSD to start failing again.
Same symptoms: every few weeks Windows locks up, then BSOD, then at the first restart "Operating system not found" message...

It seems that those Samsung SSDs last only about 2 years.

Did anyone else have similar problems?

 

I have encountered a virus several years ago that had occupied several spots on my HDD and was resisting all efforts to move it from there, so it was appearing as if my HDD had bad sectors.

To make SSDs last longer, do not fill them to more than 70% of their capacity - leave 30% free space for it to do the wear leveling, TRIM and other maintenance stuff. Check on Samsung's website if they have a utility that helps maintain SSDs - I have an Intel SSD and the Intel SSD Toolbox works great for me.

http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043634/how-to-stretch-the-life-of-your-ssd-storage.html

 

Thank you for the advice anytimer!

Initially, I was thinking about a virus, because my system was acting strange, but now I guess it's an SSD issue.

I'm trying to keep the SSDs less than 70% full (currently about 50%), however, in rare cases I fill them up to about 90% and use the laptop like that for a while. Actually, it came to my mind that this might cause the problems; the issue that appeared a few weeks ago was exactly when my SSDs were quite full.
But is this feasible that keeping the SSDs very full for a while can make them die in 1-2 years? Would be surprising.

AFAIK. these SSDs don't do TRIM, because they are in RAID0 (unless, the newer Intel RST already supports this). The Samsung Magician utility also doesn't support them.

 

It is a theoretical possibility - normally, the wear levelling feature in the SSD controller will keep moving files that are being written to very frequently to different positions so that no single block gets totally worn out. If the disk is nearly full, it can't do that any more. I have had flash drives die on me where the National Instruments license related files had worn out that area of the the disk. Glad you brought up this matter - I shall take more care with my own system.

I have asked this several times without getting a reply, but here goes again. How much of a performance hit - in real terms - do you get if you break the RAID and run those two SSDs as separate, single drives? Use one for the OS, the other for programs, etc. Do you really need lightning fast SSDs on a system where the CPU and RAM and chipset are several years old? I had an HDD model; I replaced the single HDD with a single 2.5" SSD and I'm more than happy with the performance - it is yards quicker than the HDD I had become used to. However, the bottlenecks are now elsewhere. I don't think putting in a quicker SSD will do me much good. What do you think?

A lot of problems will go away if you do away with the RAID, IMHO. RAID5, with an array of 5 or 6 disks is another story, but this RAID0 just gives you a single volume with twice the speed (which you could do without - I always partition my drives in any case), and the single non-RAID drives, although half as fast as the RAID0, will still be fast enough to push the CPU etc. to their limits.

 

When the first Vaio Z with RAID came out, we were discussing here in the forum what alternative options there are, if we don't want to use the more error-prone RAID0. However, when I got my Z2, I was happy with the way it worked, so I didn't bother testing other RAID setups. I made backups and trusted Sony/Samsung that if they came up with such a drive, then it'll work. Apparently, it works, but only for less than 2 years, which is very disappointing. Even with a sometimes full SSD, it shouldn't fail so quickly.

So, regarding your question: I haven't tested what the speed difference between RAID0 and JBOD is. As you say, in everyday usage, it wouldn't make too much of a difference. I prefer to have a single partition on my laptop, but maybe next time I get my SSDs replaced, I will try to use them in JBOD first and see how it is.

If you currently have a good SSD, replacing it with an even faster one wouldn't result in noticeable speedup (especially compared to the HDD vs SSD speedup), unless your workload relies heavily on I/O throughput. But that's not because the CPU or the RAM would become a bottleneck, they are way faster than mass storage of any kind.

 

I agree on the even faster SSD bit. If you do a lot of video encoding/re-encoding, the faster SSD will make a noticeable difference, especially in the final file writing stage. However, for most tasks that need CPU resources, a fast storage solution like an SSD merely means that the requested data is made available to the CPU in a shorter period of time. The CPU still needs to process it. A slow CPU and subsystem will become a bottleneck. HEVC (x265) encoding is a good example for illustrating this. Encoding a movie length video takes hours (almost a full day); the difference of a few minutes that the RAID0 will make in the final file writing stage is not that significant.

Take Windows loading, for instance. The SSD delivers the operating system files much quicker, but the CPU still has to load them into RAM and initialize them. Using RAID0, IMHO, will not make your Windows boot significantly quicker from shutdown, although resuming from hibernation (where the relatively large hibernation file is dumped into RAM) should definitely show a significant improvement.

 

Sure, everything depends on the workload. I'm not sure if using the Z's SSD as JBOD would make much of a difference, compared to RAID0. For most users, probably it wouldn't be noticeable.

But my point is that a high-end laptop's SSDs that were designed to be used in RAID0 should not fail within two years.
If it would have happened only once, that's okay, lemons exist, but it's happening again with the new Samsung SSDs that Sony replaced.

 

Today I received a computer with same issue. a Sony VPC-Z2.
I think it was relationship with thermal issues.
At kernal panic error (same as emev), I saw in event viewer that Thermal Zone TZ01 was enumerated, and the cooler fan was heating.
You don't have thermal problems too?
And if you configure the raid with mirror, is there a problem too? I need to fix that. the computer isn't mine. I will reinstall computer and clean the cooling system.

A zona térmica ACPI ACPI\ThermalZone\TZ01 foi enumerada.
_PSV = 369K
_TC1 = 1
_TC2 = 2
_TSP = 5000ms
_AC0 = 0K
_AC1 = 0K
_AC2 = 0K
_AC3 = 0K
_AC4 = 0K
_AC5 = 0K
_AC6 = 0K
_AC7 = 0K
_AC8 = 0K
_AC9 = 0K
_CRT = 371K
_HOT = 0K

 

I think the problem is that these SSDs are 'special' - special size/ form factor, special connectors, etc.. The global demand is much lower for these, as compared to the 2.5" SSDs, which form the bulk of this market segment. Therefore, that is where the R&D and manufacturing budgets are focused. No one is fighting to gain a sizeable chunk of the special SSD market - it is not worth their while. The bad SSDs that you keep getting as replacements are probably from the same batch, manufactured several years ago and stockpiled.

We need to give more emphasis to figuring out how to use newly designed and manufactured small form factor SSDs. Find out what is being used in the new high end laptops, and try to use them in our old ones.

 

I think I monitored the temperature when I first encountered the issues and found nothing extraordinary. But I don't remember exactly.

As I wrote, in case of both SSDs that I had, after about 1.5 years of flawless operation, suddenly the errors started appearing. If it's related to thermal issues, then the only explanation I can think of is that the laptop collects so much dust inside in 1.5 years that it starts heating up. However, I doubt that this would be the culprit of my issues (all other symptoms point at memory or storage error).

Did you find out anything since then?

I'm wondering if there's a way to fit an M.2 SSD with some adapter into the Z2...

Anyway, I took my laptop again to the same repair center in Austria (they are super nice!) and they replaced my SSDs. Now again everything is perfect. I just hope it stays like that for longer than before!