Vaio Z 750D won't boot

Subject line pretty well sums it up. No graphics and no POST. The HD spins up, but the HD indicator light never blinks.

I tried swapping out the battery and power supply, but there's no difference in behavior. It won't boot off of DVD, either.I've since made arrangements to have it sent in for repair.

Any idea what might have happened? It worked just fine yesterday, but refused to boot this morning.

At this point, I've owned it for 16 months; and after doing a quick back of the napkin cost-benefit analysis, I'm not sure it will be worth repairing...which would be a real shame, as it was a fairly expensive purchase.

 

Do you have a warranty on it or are you fixing it at your expense? What kind of graphics do you have on it, integrated or discreet? nVIDIA or ATI? Have you tried connecting it to an external monitor? and last, Do you see anything on the screen at all? I mean does it at least boot into BIOS?

 

It's out of warranty and has the nvidia 9300 discrete graphics chip. I don't see any activity at all - no drive drive activity nor the BIOS splash screen

 

Since you have no warranty I advice against sending it to sony to be fixed, it will be insanely expensive. From what I see, you seem to have a problem with the graphic chip soldered into the mobo, or the screen went dead, either ways, you can isolate the problem by connecting the laptop to an external monitor and see if you can get feedback, you can also try booting it in safe mode and see, if not then you seem to have two options, you can either try to reflow the graphic chip yourself or send it to be reflowed for around $100, or you can change the system board. I have been looking for a motherboard on ebay for you but couldn't find any so far..

If you google motherboard reflow you will find lots of tutorials both text and videos educating you about the problem and how to be solved. Let me know if I can help in anyway.

 

You believe that it's an issue with the solder joints on the graphics chip, even though there's no indication of HD activity?

 

According to my humble knowledge, when the computer doesn't even boot into bios that means there is a problem with the motherboard or graphic chip or both, and if that's true, then it also make sense that there is no hard drive activity as well because the mobo is dead.

 

Disregard for a second the hard drive activity indicator, do you actually hear is spinning when you power on the computer?

 

Okay, thanks for the insight...I'll look into it.

 

If the machine was working one day and just suddenly died as you describe, and you haven't done anything big recently (ie, BIOS firmware upgrade), it's going to be bigger than a graphics issue. I'm assuming the screen is not dead or something since there's no HDD light indicating 'brain-dead'.

First off, no post (no VAIO splash screen).
Indicates a BIOS level hardware failure. Might be bad RAM, a dead HDD, or the mobo's given up the ghost.

I'm not sure as I haven't experienced high-level hardware failure on the Z, but there are some people who heard their Z's make a quiet beep when trying to turn on their machines (I can only hear that beep if I force a hard shut-down by pressing the power button for a long time).

- Try switching the RAMs around and using just one at a time (if applicable). Or try using another DDR3 SODIMM RAM to confirm your RAM sicks are alive.

- If the HDD is dead, well, if you have the confidence you can try taking apart and installing another HDD.

- Motherboard failure. Something (most likely a capacitor) fizzed out leaving the machine completely brain dead.

Usually, if the HDD or RAM fails the machine at the very least will POST to the splash screen, followed by an error message detailing the failure. And no offence Thermodynamics, but the concept of the VGN-Z's boot sequence is that it boots using the Intel intergrated graphics, and once in the OS it will load up the nVidia drivers and start using that chip up from there (which is why you see those flickers at the log-in screen). So no, I firmly don't think it is a GPU issue.

The nVidia graphics issue was rampant with the 8k series, but even then those machines managed to boot to Windows (albeit looking horrible). Though that said, anything is possible if you can't even manage a POST.

@longhornboy
After doing the above checks, send it into Sony but state you only want a detailed diagnoses (ie, what hardware seems to be causing the issue). Once that's done, provided the problem ain't the motherboard (very expensive) you can choose what to do from there. Granted the diagnoses will cost something (shouldn't be alot), but it's a good investment if you're out of ideas.

**on hindsight, I recall Zoinks from a while back stated that applicable VAIOs wouldn't even post after he tinkered around with the TPM chip. Slight chance that could have come loose? Though as I say, no post points to a number of possibilities...