SSD diagnosis

[Hokiefyd]

I have a little M2 SSD in a 2.5" HDD adapter tray in a laptop onto which I installed Neverwear Cloudready some weeks ago (a Chromium OS build). Worked great until I closed the lid and tried to re-awaken it a few hours later. Basically, just garbled response...messy display, etc. I turned it off and on a few times, and it seemed to be dead. It finally booted, but the wireless controller wasn't working (which is odd, since it had previously worked).

I took the SSD out and put the mechanical HDD with Win 7 back in it and it boots fine, everything works, etc. I figured the SSD just got corrupted somehow. I cloned the HDD to the SSD (which I've done many times), but the laptop wouldn't boot off it. I tried this a few times, but could never get the computer to boot. I booted from a Win 7 recovery DVD, but it said there was no Windows partition.

I canned the whole drive in Disk Management and figured I'd run chkdsk on it. It would not format. I went to the command prompt and tried a "format d: /q". That didn't work (all NTFS boot sectors unwriteable). I tried a "format d:". It took about an hour, but then that failed at the end, giving me the boot sectors unwriteable message. "chkdsk d:" doesn't work because it's not an NTFS volume (RAW). But I can't format it into an NTFS volume.

Can I conclude the SSD is bad? Or are there any other tools I can use before I toss it?

 

[Ramblejam]

What does the manufacturer SSD toolbox say?

 

[Hokiefyd]

If you're asking what the manufacturer recommends, seems not much. It's a low-cost chip:

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/mydigit...-2242-ngff-ssd/

That's the exact one. There doesn't seem to be any support page with SSD management apps or anything like that.

 

[Ramblejam]

Will other apps (Intel SSD Toolbox, for example) pick it up? Would like to see SMART data...

 

[gojoneeded]

I would go to the SSD manufactures site and download their eraser utility. Each SSD manufacturer has their own utility to erase these drives since they are all different. Once you get NTFS off of there and it is as blank as the day you bought it, you can then install win 7 with some drivers from the manufacturer, since Win 7 probably doesn't have the drivers on the installer. You may also have to change some settings in the BIOS to make it all happy.

 

[Donald]

Crystal Disk Info is the best disk tool I have come across.

 

[Rand]

Probably dead or dying. I'd stick to name brand. they are cheap enough now with budget models.

 

[Hokiefyd]

I'll look at Crystal Disk. MyDigitalSSD doesn't appear to have any drive utility.

I suspect it is dead -- I've tried Ease US, Macrium, and Windows' Disk Management utility (plus the command line). I really can't get anything to make much use of it.

 

[mk378]

You could try any tool offering ATA Secure Erase. Secure erasing is supposed to be an industry standard, not brand specific. If the erase fails or you still can't reformat afterward, the drive is bad.

 

[Rand]

something like https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-Premier-SP5...308425&sr=2

would be a nice step up.. its not a samsung 950 pro but at least its brand name.

 

[Shata]

Originally Posted By: Donald
Crystal Disk Info is the best disk tool I have come across.

+1 use that. I actually had it warn me of failing wd 1tb drive. Jumped on newegg grabbed 256gb ssd from san disk. Works great.

 

[Shata]

Just a little tip also ssd's don't like clean formats where you write all sectors over with zeros it's not good for them and puts a lot of wear on them. Quick formats should be done when there is no issues. You can try clean formats when there is issues just to get bad sectors sorted out and turned off because it has spare that it will replace the bad ones with.

But regardless I'd drop the drive first sec I see SMART issues my wd had like 4000 bad sectors I clean formatted it 4 times and all sectors are replaced but still that drive is trash and can't be trusted anymore. Now I run 5tb raid 1 for all my important stuff.

 

[Hokiefyd]

Crystal Disk can see the drive and reports its Health Status as "Good".

[/url]

Windows' Disk Management allows me to set a drive letter, but it does allow me to format it. It says that it's offline, even though it's reported by DM to be online and to have a drive letter.

There is a lot going on there. Disk 0 is a Samsung Evo 120 GB SSD installed in the machine. OS and software is on it. Disk 1 is a 1 TB WD My Passport used for data. Disk 2 is a USB stick. Disk 3 is a 12 TB WD My Book Duo formatted as 6 TB RAID for redundancy. All of my work data is on that. Disk 4 is the MyDigitalSSD in a 2.5" laptop HDD adapter tray. All indicators are that it's "good" and recognized by the computer -- I just can't seem to actually DO anything with it anymore.

Any ideas?

 

[Rand]

I'm wondering if its one of those fake drives that say they are 120GB but only have say.. 32GB of chips on em.

 

[Hokiefyd]

Originally Posted By: Rand
I'm wondering if its one of those fake drives that say they are 120GB but only have say.. 32GB of chips on em.


Windows sees it as a 120 GB drive (well, 112 GB readable), and used to format it as such. I can't say that I've ever had more than about 20 GB on it, just because it's had either an older installation of Windows 7 on it with minimal other apps, or I've used it for various experiments with Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Chromium OS. To be fair, this drive HAS been completely wiped and formatted countless times by the Linux and Cloudready installers. The last time it was known to work is when it had Chromium OS on it. That's when it got glitchy, and it's never been bootable or readable since then.

But...curiously...Crystal Disk thinks it's fine? Strange!

 

[Hokiefyd]

Ramblejam suggested using diskpart in Windows.

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-and-format-storage-drive-using-diskpart-windows-10

This seems to have done the trick. The drive reports in Disk Management that it's formatted and I can copy files to, and access them from, the SSD. Crystal Disk's metrics on the drive have not changed since before the operation. Something REALLY hosed this drive up. I'm thinking it was a glitch within Cloudready's implementation of Chromium OS on this older (and not officially supported) laptop. I closed the lid to put it to sleep, and waking it from sleep by opening the lid sent it to crazy town. Diskpart seems to have sorted it.

Thank you all!