HELP - T2XP intermittent boot problem - don't know what to fix

[mcbridd]

All,

I have a beautiful T2XP which I have enjoyed the company of for the past 3 years and which has served me dutifully. About 2 weeks ago, on two seperate occasions, after a restart from overnight hibernation (not shut down), the system presented me with an error stating that it could not read from my second partition (drive D). I presumed that there was nothing too serious and continued to work.

Then, on last Monday night, after a hard days work, I put the machine into hibernation. On returning to it the following morning I found it would not boot. I tried to start it a few times and only after I had toyed with it a bit and placed it back on the desk with the battery removed did it finally start. It appeared to be fine, but I decided to take no chances and began to try to ghost it's drives to my backup USB drive. On 3 attempts at doing this, Norton Ghost reported that there were bad sectors on the drive and could not continue.

On seeing this I proceeded to spend most of Tuesday and Wednesday performing disk checks and file by file backups. All disk tests and S.M.A.R.T. analysis that I have conducted have presented no errors with the disk. A CHKDSK pass over it informed me that no fixes had been made.

What I have now noticed is that since this began, the machine will only start intermittently now. When it does not start, the CD drive spins up and the power light comes on but nothing else happens. I then have to hold my finger on the power button for 3 seconds to turn it off. Just before the machine turns off there is a quiet click from the drive. Sometimes the machine will start when I am holding it off the desk in my hands, but by the time I have put it back on the desk it has hung, including sometimes hanging at the VAIO BIOS boot logo.

When the machine does rarely boot it will sometimes let me work on it for hours. I spent 5 hours on Friday night doing a complete system restore and removing the software I did not want, only to find that the machine would not boot again on Saturday morning. On the occasions that it does start up I can tell when it will load windows as the NUM, CAPS and SCROLL LOCK lights flicker, followed by the DVD drive read, followed by the hard disk read.

I have also received a few blue screens when in Windows, including one this evening while attempting to format the C drive from a Norton Ghost boot disk. The message on the BSOD has never been the same message. It is always a different error.

My machine is out of warranty, but I am desperate to save it and, as an IT consultant, rely on it exclusively for my work. I have all my backups, so I can do anything necessary to save it. I have also invested in 3 batteries for it (for long flights) and do not want this investment wasted, but I also do not want to pay £1000 to fix it when I could buy another for that price.

Should I buy a new disk and hope that this fixes the problem, or is it likely to be the motherboard ? Where should I start ?

Thanks in advance,
Darren

[Blencogo]

Hi Darren and welcome.

Hopefully Thalamus will have arranged to send you the manual.

It does sound like a failing drive and the probable best next step is to check the contacts to the hard drive and also check the seating of the memory modules by removing them, cleaning the contacts and replacing.

As well as checking the drive, run a memory check as the memory modules are the second favorite.

You can try reinstalling the OS but after that you are getting toward the expensive causes like the mobo.

Good luck.

[Thalamus.]

Hopefully Thalamus will have arranged to send you the manual.

I may have... :smileygrin:

[mcbridd]

Blencogo and Thalamus,

Thanks again you two. I have noticed, from reading over the past few days, the level of support you provide to less technical people like myself here.

I have now been able to disassemble my notebook, disconnect the drive and restart the PC. It boots every time, albeit with the missing OS message, confirming the faulty drive. Had it been the MOBO, I would have simply given up as Sony's repair prices are huge (£324 to fix and install a new drive - I can buy one for £54).

I have placed another message concerning drive interfaces on the other post, and if you folks get a chance, maybe you could answer the other final question I posted there.

As a side note, and confirming how much I need this notebook to do my job, I rushed out and ordered a new TZ21WN on Thursday. It arrived on Friday and I proceeded to set up the device. After setup finished I began removing applications I didn't want, but the HDD protection that tries to protect the disk in the event of the PC being dropped kept kicking in and preventing me from using it to any effectiveness. For anyone else reading this, if you get this HDD protection message, Sony advised me that I have to do a full recovery to switch it off again, otherwise it will persist. Seems a bit drastic, but there you go. For the record, I followed Sony's advice and did a subsequent recovery (2 in fact), but the problem got worse and now I can not even perform a full install on the new notebook.

So that has been my luck for the past week, culminating with complete frustration on Friday but ending with happiness on Sunday to know that it is only my disk at fault in my original T2XP.

Thanks again folks,
Darren