Z21: Sudden Windows problems and OS not found

Hi everyone,

A few hours ago, my Z21 did something strange:

It was asleep and when I woke it up as usual, Windows showed up for half a second, then the screen turned black, and after another second, Windows came back but Aero was disabled and everything looked and acted strange. I think the screen resolution was decreased, too.
I couldn't open any websites, even though the network connection dialog (it looked different, than normal) showed that I'm still connected to my wifi network. Then I closed Firefox and clicked that it should save my tabs.
I wanted to restart the laptop, but when I opened the "Shut down" sub-menu in the start menu, the menu locked up and I couldn't click anything. I pressed ctrl+alt+del, the usual screen showed up, along with an error message that Firefox experienced a fatal I/O error. Then I used the power menu on the ctrl+alt+del screen and I could restart from there.
Shutdown took a very long time, but when the laptop finally restarted, I got an "Operating System Not Found" message. I pressed the power button for a few seconds to turn off the laptop.
When I turned it on after a few minutes, I got the usual "Windows was not shut down properly" screen, Chkdsk ran, etc. Since then the laptop is working well again. I checked the Windows systems logs, but could not find any problems (other than the system not shut down properly error).

Any ideas what could have caused this? I hope it will not happen again.

Thanks!

PS: recently, 2-3 times when I moved some files into subfolders, the disk operations took longer than usual. But as I said, this happened only a few times, not always. Don't know if this has anything to do with the problems.

 

I saw this happen twice in a about a year. In both cases, I was trying to reboot while docked and got a BSD. After rebooting, I got a drive array error and the OS not found error. As you did, I forced a power off and waited a few minutes. After that, everything was fine. I never found a root case. After that I made sure to never reboot while docked. I wondered if a driver error was corrupting the BIOS and a hard boot was needed to reset it.

 

Thanks for the reply, rrm998!

Before creating this thread, I found some posts with the exact same problem that you are describing (OS not found after rebooting while docked).
But mine seems to be a little different. I have never connected the PMD since I bought the laptop, and I also did not get any BSD. After waking up the laptop and before restarting it, I had the feeling as if some of my HW components would not be working. It seemed as if the network card, the display adapter and the hard drive would be malfunctioning.
Fortunately, since then everything has been normal, but it is still strange that there was such an issue.

 

True, my issue with rebooting while docked is well known. I just thought the result was similar and both issues are probably hardware related, as you noted. Have you updated the BIOS? As I think back, this stopped happening after the last BIOS update.

 

Yes, some parts of it are similar, maybe the cause is similar too. As you said, it might be a driver issue.
I installed all the updates that were shown in VAIO Update (except the messed up Synaptics touchpad driver), but there was nothing new lately. Thanks for the idea, though!