I have a Sony VPC-Z11 with its proprietary RAID0 SSD architecture (384GB in my case, 3 logical 128GB drives) that fairly recently developed a problem that is not rare but also not very common in booting up this computer. What has happened is that after a brief splash screen showing the BIOS kicking in (normal) there is an increasingly long delay before booting into Windows 7 while a black screen with a blinking white cursor sits there for 15-22 seconds, blinking up to 26 times (!) before the Windows 7 flag appears and boot up proceeds, taking no more than 20 seconds to complete. The black screen with the blinking cursor kind of snuk up on me. Seems like it was always there, but came and went so quickly it didn't make much of an impression. In the beginning, it did 2-5 blinks and was gone in 3 seconds or so. Over the past 3-4 months, that interval went from 3 seconds to over 20 seconds, from 2-5 "blinks" before staring windows to now 26-28 blinks!
This is still a relatively fast booting computer - about 45 seconds from cold boot to fully ready - but that is nearly double what it has been for most of its 1.5 yr life, and the cause entirely eludes me. The SSDs are still performing great in speed tests (ATTO, HD Tune, etc) and all else seems well. I am only using about 60 of the 384GB of SSD capacity.
Any idea what causes the black/blinking cursor screen? Ideas for what I can try to eliminate it or at least get it back down to 5 seconds or less? Among the many virtues of this machine was its lightening fast boot time, even with SATA II SSD/bus, and now it is a significant annoyance when installing software/drivers that require constant rebooting.
Someone said there was a way to "unlink" the RAID0, do a clean install or an early image recovery and then re-link the RAID array, and that this should have the effect of "resetting" the SSDs to "day one" state. I am not a newb/novice, but also not very well versed in RAID so I would be willing to attempt anything deemed low risk, but need a bit of for-dummies instruction.
Thanks so much.
This is still a relatively fast booting computer - about 45 seconds from cold boot to fully ready - but that is nearly double what it has been for most of its 1.5 yr life, and the cause entirely eludes me. The SSDs are still performing great in speed tests (ATTO, HD Tune, etc) and all else seems well. I am only using about 60 of the 384GB of SSD capacity.
Any idea what causes the black/blinking cursor screen? Ideas for what I can try to eliminate it or at least get it back down to 5 seconds or less? Among the many virtues of this machine was its lightening fast boot time, even with SATA II SSD/bus, and now it is a significant annoyance when installing software/drivers that require constant rebooting.
Someone said there was a way to "unlink" the RAID0, do a clean install or an early image recovery and then re-link the RAID array, and that this should have the effect of "resetting" the SSDs to "day one" state. I am not a newb/novice, but also not very well versed in RAID so I would be willing to attempt anything deemed low risk, but need a bit of for-dummies instruction.
Thanks so much.
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