Corrupted SSD. Can see files but not copy them. Out of ideas.

[trontoad]

Hello everybody, I'm Virginia.

I'm trying to help my boyfriend with some work data he lost.
He had an ADATA SDD SP550 drive working perfectly for no more than a year as the sole drive on a Windows 7 laptop until stopped booting showing only a black screen two days ago.
I advised him to get the SSD after losing a HDD witth all of his data on it.
Unfortunatelly, he never uploaded to the cloud his back-ups and only left them in a separated NTFS partition in the HD.

The BIOS would still see the disk.
The Recovery Disk of Windows would NOT see it.
Diskpart would not list any HD on that machine.

I took it out of the laptop and connected it to my desktop (Windows 7) using an USB to SATA adaptor that is my regular Go-To when trying to to recover data.

The computer would see it sometimes as a drive and would allow me to see the drive, partitions, folders and even files BUT, I cannot copy any of them out. Errors given vary from "File Not Found" in Windows to "The semaphore timeout period has expired." in DOS.

I tried re-writing the MBR using AOMEI Partition Assistant but that didn't change anything. When I tried to use the Partition Recovery Wizard on the drive, AOMEI stopped responding.

I tried RecoverMyFiles and it took him a long time (one hour or so) to be able to read each partition and when I finally selected the partition I wanted to search in for his valuables files, it worked for a long time but stopped responding. I tried contacting the manufacturer (GetData) but they were not available. I am willing to buy the software but if it can recover something...

I would like to create an image of this piece of crap before it gets further corrupted but ForensicImager tells me that my available 600 GB on main drive of my laptop is not enough to contain the image of a 123 GB partition. The total size of the drive is 240 GB so, I don't know what the heck is going on here either.

I would like first to understand what could be wrong with the drive to pursue the right course of action instead of just wasting time.

I don't know how to use a disk editor but I wonder if that could help my case.
I tried peeking at DMDE and when I select the disk it says: "LBA:0 (try 0) WinError 2 The system cannot find the file specified." I can click the button "Ignore" ("Ignore All" is grayed out) and I clicked it many times up to LBA: 4xx to 500 but I decided to abort.

If anybody could give me some pointers, I would relly appreciate it.
Thank you,
Virginia

 

[drtweak]

1) Honestly sound like it needs to go to a pro service. Sounds like a SSD controller failure to me. They will have to unsolder all the chips, toss them in a machine, make images of each one (if they are still good) then rebuild them virtually.

2) WHY IS THERE NO BACKUP? BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! If your data is NOT in 3 places it is NOT backed up! And a RAID is not a backup solution.

3) The reason why the software is telling you there is not enough space is because when you deal with stuff like this it makes a 1:1 clone of the drive which requies the space of the FULL DRIVE not just the data or this partition or that partition. it ignore ALL PARTITIONS and any logic schemes on the drive and just starts at sector 1 until the last sector and make an exact copy of every single bit.

I would honestly stop messing with the drive as more than likely with out a $10,000 worth of special diag equipment you probably won't get far.

Check this guy out though. He is pretty successfully in data recovery. I have sent stuff to all kinds of places (Drive Savers, Kroll) and were always unsuccessful for the stuff this guys fixes. I'll be sending all my future stuff to him.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsojCyeOSuw4Odm6MyBXLmg

 

[trontoad]

1) Honestly sound like it needs to go to a pro service. Sounds like a SSD controller failure to me. They will have to unsolder all the chips, toss them in a machine, make images of each one (if they are still good) then rebuild them virtually.

2) WHY IS THERE NO BACKUP? BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! If your data is NOT in 3 places it is NOT backed up! And a RAID is not a backup solution.

3) The reason why the software is telling you there is not enough space is because when you deal with stuff like this it makes a 1:1 clone of the drive which requies the space of the FULL DRIVE not just the data or this partition or that partition. it ignore ALL PARTITIONS and any logic schemes on the drive and just starts at sector 1 until the last sector and make an exact copy of every single bit.

I would honestly stop messing with the drive as more than likely with out a $10,000 worth of special diag equipment you probably won't get far.

Check this guy out though. He is pretty successfully in data recovery. I have sent stuff to all kinds of places (Drive Savers, Kroll) and were always unsuccessful for the stuff this guys fixes. I'll be sending all my future stuff to him.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsojCyeOSuw4Odm6MyBXLmg

 

[trontoad]

@DrTweak:
Thank you so much for your answer!

1) Why do you think this? Could a faulty controller chip allow the seeing of the drive in another PC, its partitions and even its files? Yes, I know that the index is separated from the data but it seems to me that a faulty controller should either allow it to "work" or "not work" at all. Am I wrong about this?

2) My boyfriend thought that:
A) An SDD drive would be almost trouble free. Truth is, I ALSO thought it would last MUCH LONGER than a disk with movable parts!!! Boy, was I wrong... I am SO DISGUSTED with this situation... you have no idea. I would like to know what the heck to buy (besides expensive server-grade storage solutions I cannot afford) to get some 3 to 5 years of trouble-free HDD as we used to before with older technology...
B) He also thought that by putting the .zip files on a separated partition on the same drive, it was good enough. I believe that after this, he had learned his lesson... and he hates see me struggling again trying to recover his files so, the poor guy will back up to the cloud from now on.

3) My C: partition has 600 GB free and the total size of the bad SSD is 240 GB.

Since I don't know what the heck to buy anymore, I am not ready to purchase another HDD to mirror the whole thing. I would prefer to create an image file (including bad sectors if any) to the free space on my HD and do further testings on the image.

On the other hand, I would like to get some insight as how to properly troubleshoot a faulty drive as I am SURE I am not approaching it as I should. For instance, should I be using a SATA to USB adapter or should I just leave it on it's laptop and try recovery efforts from a virtual environment booting with a CD?

Thank you again for your time,
Virginia

 

[USAFRet]

Drives die.
All of them.
No matter what type they are.

Always always always have a backup Both local and cloud if desired.

Currently, in my house, I have ~20 drives in regular use.
8x SSD in the PCs, and the rest spinning drives in or connected to my NAS box.

There are multi level backups of all of it.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

I've had 1 drive die in the last 5 years or so...a WD Green 3TB.

 

[trontoad]

@USAFRet,
Thank you for your answer. To be honest, I really thought SDD were way more stable than a disk with movable parts. Why they are not?
I must say that your avatar reminds me of a very good game I used to play long ago called "Neverhood"

I looked at your post about how people back up their data. I believe you got so many responsible responses because you got a lot of enthusiastic IT people to answer. I believe the regular folk don't even know still that these expensive devices are nowadays crap....
As for myself, after a couple of my "Back-Up" solutions died, the thought of starting to back up again to DVDs, froze me and I stopped... And I also stopped bugging family members about it, hence my boyfriend losing his hard work.

Now that I have failed at recovering ANY data from the last two drives that went belly up, I will start with DVD Back-Ups again...

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, SSD's are generally "more" reliable than spinning drives.
That does not mean "100% never die".

FWIW, none of my 8 SSD's has died, in the 6 years I've been using them.
I've had 1 HDD die in that time period.

But physically dead drives are not the only way, or even the prime way, to lose data.
Accidental deletion, virus, "oops, I formatted the wrong drive"....all more common and just as fatal.


And yes, that is the main character from The Neverhood.

 

[trontoad]

That's Clayman! Loved that game!

I wish I had your luck. This SSD was barely a year old and KINDLY treat it. The laptop never fell nor it had a toddler walking on it like it happened to an old Acer laptop of mine that survived it...

I thought ADATA was a good brand. Hard to guess with the globalization of parts of today's economy... :/

Do you have any experience on data recovery? I could really use some pointers...

 

[USAFRet]

TestDisk

But if it is a physical drive fail, nothing our here in the consumer space will work.
Even moreso being an SSD.