I think my 2 year old UH572 has developed a problem with it's 32GB Cache Drive, and I'm hoping someone can help me fix it.
After using Windows 10 tech preview for a few months, I decided to go back to Windows 7. Install went fine to my main drive (240GB SSD), and I left the laptop installing windows updates for a few hours. After all the windows updates installed I used the laptop for a couple of hours with no issue. Turned it off, then came back to it the morning after and on boot all I got was a black screen. Tried turning it on/off a few times, used reset button on the bottom to reset boot cycle, and still the same, just a black screen. No HD activity lights blinking, just a black screen and the hum of the cpu fan.
After a few more reboot/reset attempts, I decided to leave it on the black screen for a while, just to see what happened. Anyway after quite a long time it started booting into windows 7, and appeared to be working fine. The only issue I could see was that the 32GB Cache drive was no longer visible in Explorer (it had been D:). So I dug around in Device Manager, then DiskPart, and the cache drive has disappeared completely. Tried rebooting the laptop again, and once again got the black screen.
Tried to get into the bios, pressed F2, and waited, and after another long wait got into the bios. Reset everything back to factory default, rebooted and still black screen. I've done some timing and whenever the laptop boots up it takes just shy of 6 minutes for the laptop to do anything after it's turned on. This includes entering the BIOS (F2), boot device selection (F12) or just letting it boot to windows. Whatever I try to do, at boot, the machine is completely unresponsive until this 6 minute period of nothing but black screen has passed.
As you might imagine this is a little 'inconvenient'. If I leave the laptop in windows, and just put it to sleep, it works fine, but if I turn it off, I have to wait ages before it even starts to boot to windows.
My guess is that the Cache Drive has developed some sort of fault, and the BIOS/UEFI/POST is checking it, and taking a (really, really, really) long time to decide that it's not there, and this is what is causing the delay.
If this is the case, is it possible to 'reset' the cache drive? or replace it? or even remove/disable it?
I'm not actually too bothered about the cache drive itself, one of the first things I did when I bought the ultrabook is replace the 500GB HD with an SSD, so the cache drive has been basically used as a windows page file/temp disk, so I don't need it for performance. I just want my machine to boot up properly again.
Anyone got any ideas/suggestions?