Question Bricked ssd?

[Sm0k0]

Hi!

So I "upgraded" an older PC with some spare parts I had around. It is an Asus H81M-K motherboard with an older Intel i3 and a gtx960. I replaced the RAM with one 8gb piece, and added an old 240gb SSD and an HDD on top of the 1tb HDD it already had. Formatted all 3 drives and installed win10 home to the SSD. It was running smoothly for the past few months, altough not used very often - maybe twice a week - since my dad is pretty much the only one using it now.

Anyway, yesterday when booting up it asked for a password, a BIOS one (blue box saying input password). I never entered neither an Admin nor a User password and after trying a few common passwords and some sinple ones that I would maybe use in such a case I did a manual BIOS reset using the CLRTC pins short on the motherboard. After that I was able to access BIOS normally, but the windows wouldn't boot.

Plugging the SSD into another PC (it says on it it's an SP S55 SSD), I could see the drive in the device manager, but not under drives in "This PC" or whatever it is called (not an english UI, win10). Disk manager was able to "see" it but not to assign it, same as a 3rd party software I used. Also couldn't format it, but it said 223GB available of 223GB.

An hour or so ago I used a flashed windows drive to try booting into safe mode without success (it didn't offer one), tried the upgrade option, said there were no windows on it. Finally I tried to install a fresh version, but there was no option to format the drive (it was greyed out) in the windows installer, and lastly when trying to create a new partition using the same installer it gave me an error message after 5-10min of seemingly doing nothing.

So my question is is the drive dead, and how can it happen that an SSD just randomly "dies" or gets locked out so that I can prevent it in the future? Or is it some sort of ransomware or something I perhaphs did?

In my previous experience, when an HDD "died" or was corrupted it just gave me the Blue screen of death, but I was able to extract data using another PC. Be aware, there is no data here that is not backed up or vital if lost, I don't need to salvage anything and it's not a problem to just put another fresh SSD into the PC and run it, I am just curious as to what happened and would like to try all options and to access it if possible mostly because I'm interested in the topic, and I'm willing to try out any suggestions and experiment a bit in the name of science

Thanks in advance,
Dominik

 

[RealBeast]

I would try a secure erase on the SSD. I've gotten a lot of use out of problem SSDs after doing that either with a bios tool if your motherboard supports it, or a command prompt window on another computer (or that computer with a windows installer disk, or another computer) using diskpart, listdisk, select disk n, clean all. Just be sure to choose the correct disk to clean all.

 

[Sm0k0]

I would try a secure erase on the SSD. I've gotten a lot of use out of problem SSDs after doing that either with a bios tool if your motherboard supports it, or a command prompt window on another computer (or that computer with a windows installer disk, or another computer) using diskpart, listdisk, select disk n, clean all. Just be sure to choose the correct disk to clean all.

Thank you for your suggestion, I will try it out today and let you know the results. If it works out, I suppose I would use it as a secondary drive, not to store anything important but as an installation directory for some apps, in case this happens again?

 

[RealBeast]

Thank you for your suggestion, I will try it out today and let you know the results. If it works out, I suppose I would use it as a secondary drive, not to store anything important but as an installation directory for some apps, in case this happens again?

I've had them work for years if a secure erase repairs an SSD. I would do a diagnostic check on it though to check its integrity and current SMART values.

As with any drive, always backup important data on a frequent basis.

 

[Sm0k0]

Unfortunately the suggested method didn't work. After starting the clean all via the command prompt I left it for about an hour or so and when I came back I was welcomed by:
"DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. See the System Event Log for more information."