Question AHAD 512GB SSD showing 32kb in Zenbook

[Dusteki]

I’ve got an ASUS Zenbook UX501VW i7 24GB 512SSD GTX960 Win10 out of warranty. The SSD inside is a AHAD 2280. Win 10.

I was watching a film today off the external drive and I got an orange screen crash which I have never seen. I rebooted and since my external SSD also has a recover and fix boot partition, I got into command line mode, headed for diskpart and I’ve got Drive 0 showing 32 kB (not GB) and Drive 1 aka the external one with correct size. I am not talking about partition size but the disk Liam.

I then unscrewed the laptop, cleaned up inside, checked the cable but couldn’t remove the drive to try and reseat it because I didn’t have the right screwdriver. I didn’t bother doing anything else because this doesn’t seem to be a missing file problem or even a partition size issue - things I have been able to cope with in the past using SCF and DCIM without ever resorting to a format or reinstall.

BIOS shows ABSOLUTELY nothing, it has no information on drives internal or external. Most limited BIOS I have ever seen.

I have seen no posts from Zenbook owners, just one from somebody with an intel drive and some apple owners with 32kb issues. One PC suggestion was to take the drive out, boot the computer and let it sit in BIOS for a while before reinstalling the SSD - which I can try. Another suggestion was to grab intel firmware but I can’t see this sort of option for the SSD on the ASUS - I guess I’d also need another USB drive to do that.

Any ideas that do not include replacing the drive - the $ is not that bad but I got some data that can’t be recovered and really don’t want to reinstall windows, games, drivers, office, Wifi and all that shit. Luckily I got
Dropbox backing up work and a second pc.

 

[Dusteki]

Removed the drive today and replaced it. The computer went into some weird boot mode where it wasn’t booting but wasn’t going into BIOS.

 

[fzabkar]

When an SSD identifies itself with a reduced capacity, it usually points to a firmware fault, which in turn can be due to bad NAND flash memory. In short, there are no DIY solutions that I'm aware of. Unfortunately your BIOS does not seem to be cooperating, otherwise you may find that your SSD is reporting some strange model name (its factory alias).

I could help you to confirm the voltage test points on your SSD, but I would need detailed photos of both sides. You could try a USB adapter, but that will probably only confirm that your SSD is dead.

 

[Dusteki]

Thx.

Now things have become weird.

I’ve got an external usb SSD drive which I use for emergencies and recovery for windows 10 - command line etc. It boots into recovery/repair mode. I took the SSD from that and put it into the zenbook. I put the SSD from the zenbook into the usb drive. The disk with the issue shows up in diskpart when in the external disk unlike when installed in the PC.

Diskpart and list disk shows these values which are weird and wrong

https://twitter.com/x/status/1113427568903036929

View: https://twitter.com/warriorscomeout/status/1113427568903036929?s=21


Disk 0 aka the old external drive shouldn’t be this full, about 5 gbs should be free.

Disk 1 should show about 60gbs free and not all.

I haven’t connected the external drive to another PC yet to check if I have file acces.