How to Save Your Vita From The Blue Light of Death
No matter how much is spent on product testing, bug fixing and quality assurance, stuff breaks. Even the sexy Vita can suffer from crashes, freezes, sudden power fails and other system problems. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy way to fix most of them.
When we were playing Hustle Kings on one of our Vitas an error code popped up, the screen froze and the Vita’s blue light began to flash – a problem we’ve affectionately called the blue light of death. The Vita then died, powered off and wouldn’t respond to commands or a quick tap of the power button. If something similar happens to you, don’t panic, here’s what you do:
First off, obviously make sure your Vita hasn’t just run out of power, or hasn’t overheated in sunlight (in which case, simply leave it somewhere shady to fully cool).
Then, hold down your power button from about 30 seconds until you see this:
Try restarting the system first. If that works, great! It was just a little glitch, everything is ok. If the problem keeps reoccurring when you play a certain digital game, delete it and redownload.
Still no luck? Try rebuilding the database next, it shouldn’t take too long and fixes a lot of problems.
After that, try and update, unfortunately updates on PS3 rarely fixed problems from reboot, but it is worth a shot.
At this stage, if you still have no luck, you have a real problem – formatting your memory card will lose all your data on the card, and restoring the Vita will wipe the system’s memory. Wiping the Vita first is more convenient as you at least won’t lose saves or have to redownload PSN games. If neither of those work, unfortunately you’ll have to hope your warranty is still valid – but hopefully it won’t come to that.
Has your Vita crashed, do you have any other tips? Be sure to let us know in the comments below, and ask me questions at sebastian.moss@playstationlifestyle.net.
14 Responses to “How to Save Your Vita From The Blue Light of Death”
No problems here yet although I have read posts of victims on other sites and it seems a majority of the causes are stemming from the system not playing nice with firmware updates, but in every case the steps you’ve listed above have resolved the problem for those experiencing it.
I dont think is fair to call it blue light of death Sebastian since it have a solution and it doesn’t mean the death of the system. A red ligh of death for example on xbox it means is death and you cannot do anything about it so it is very different. Don’t try to give an unfair and negative publicity to Vita.
What do you suggest we call it, then? Blue light of comatose?
Relax a little. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been extremely positive about the Vita thus far. We called it that because there’s nothing else to call it and we want to help people freaking out when this happens to them. There’s no negativity or unfairness here.
Blue Light of death is way over the top
Call it “Vita’s Blues”
it happen to me about three times, two when turning the 3g on and off. No biggie so far. Hard resets are acceptable from time to time
i was thinking the “blue light of inconvenience”.
Blue Light of Destructive Dismemberment and Disparity!
Vita’s Blue Coma Light, aka BCL
or Vita’s Blinking Blues, aka B^2
People get so attached to their systems that even the smallest thing that they think is said negativly about it offends them… I kindly ask you to grow up a little, it’s just a piece of hardware.
That happened to me not an hour ago. Haha. Kind of freaked out for a sec but luckily it sorted itself out like you said.
I have had Zero crashes to date and have been playing with the thing heavily since receiving it last Wednesday
Unit 13 was killing my PS Vita. I had lags, freezes, and sound loss at first try on the demo and then I had to restart the system.
Almost returned it! Great post…Thanks. No idea what caused the blue light.
I’m having the same problem with unit 13! It’s happen twice already, the screen goes black & the blue ps light keeps flashing. I had to let the battery run completely down lastnight by letting the light flash, til it was dead. Then hooked the Sony charger up & let it charge an hour & no problem, worked fine til about an hour ago & I checked on here to c if anybody else had the same problem. Glad u all could help! Thanks
i just had the same problem with unit 13 today. was playing was fine most of the day till all sudden the sound cut out so i exited the game and when i went to turn off the vita screen went black and ps symbol cont to blink blue. i held the power button down for 30 secs or so brought the screen in pic above select restart vita and everything was fine. i deleted unit 13 since i don’t want the problem again. It seems to me that dl games are causing this problem mainly and Sony needs to look into this