Dead SSD conundrum?

[papayoyo]

My 480GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD has apparently died. It was running Windows 10 for two years and now has 4 raw partitions that show up in BIOS and Disk Management.

I've tried every possible trick and piece of software to revive, restore, rescue the drive and data to no avail. It refuses to reformat, clean in Diskpart, or allow access to any partition for file recovery. It appears to all intents and purposes to be dead and beyond redemption.

Yet!... When I try to boot from the drive it boots into Windows 10 recovery options. So the recovery partition would appear to be still functioning, even though it shows as RAW and won't allow any access any other way.

Is there any hope of recovering the data from this drive?

 

[popatim]

No, not that you had much chance at recovering anyways due to the nature of how SSD's work; Trim and Garbage Collection being the main culprits.

 

[papayoyo]

No, not that you had much chance at recovering anyways due to the nature of how SSD's work; Trim and Garbage Collection being the main culprits.

But surely if the recovery partition is still booting, the other partitions should be theoretically accessible somehow?

 

[pyeloyev]

Could you explain exactly what your goal is? Usually when people have HDD/SSD problems, there are two different and mostly unrelated goals:

1. Data recovery
2. Drive restoration

You said you tried to recover data and format it in the same paragraph, which accomplish opposite goals and are not compatible with each other.

If you are trying to recover data, which is usually the biggest concern since drives are cheap, time is not:
1. Immediately stop using the drive.
2. Do not try to boot from it.
3. Do not even turn the computer on with the drive still connected until you are ready to make an attempt to back up the drive.
4. Once you have a suitable backup drive connected, boot from a different operating system and try to read the data from the drive by copying all of your important files to the backup drive (preferably a new, reliable drive).

Once you have your data back (if you were successful), feel free to tinker with the drive.

****formating the drive = data deletion, so please make sure you set your goals clearly before you proceed. If you format your drive, quick data recovery will be next to impossible.

 

[papayoyo]

Thanks for the considered response, and yes my goal is to get the data back. I immediately took the drive out and installed windows on a new drive. My laptop has 2 sata ports so I put the dead one back in. It was recognised by the BIOS and Windows and all partitions are still there, but showing as raw. So I and tried firstly all the data recovery options, which reportedly work on even raw drives but got nothing but errors trying to read it. Then I tried partition repair software, more errors. As a last resort I used Diskpart to try and clean and format the drive, hoping to trigger it back to life and hoping the data would still be recoverable but even that was impossible, giving an error, "file is unavailable". It seems like even though the partitions can all be seen, none of them can be written to or read. Except, the mystery is... if I try to boot from this drive it successfully boots into the Windows 10 recovery partition, giving me various options to try and recover Windows, none of which work. This is what gives me hope that something can be done to rescue the data.

 

[pyeloyev]

Thanks for the considered response, and yes my goal is to get the data back. I immediately took the drive out and installed windows on a new drive. My laptop has 2 sata ports so I put the dead one back in. It was recognised by the BIOS and Windows and all partitions are still there, but showing as raw. So I and tried firstly all the data recovery options, which reportedly work on even raw drives but got nothing but errors trying to read it. Then I tried partition repair software, more errors. As a last resort I used Diskpart to try and clean and format the drive, hoping to trigger it back to life and hoping the data would still be recoverable but even that was impossible, giving an error, "file is unavailable". It seems like even though the partitions can all be seen, none of them can be written to or read. Except, the mystery is... if I try to boot from this drive it successfully boots into the Windows 10 recovery partition, giving me various options to try and recover Windows, none of which work. This is what gives me hope that something can be done to rescue the data.

Once again, the two parts I highlighted in bold accomplish opposite goals. Formatting the drive will, like I said, likely destroy the data. If I were you, I'd try some of the bootable USB Linux operating systems like Ultimate Boot CD (though it can be burned to boot from a USB). UBCD has PartedMagic which has sometimes been known to access files on such partitions. Then there is this:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Which may help you repair your partition. But only assuming your formatting it didn't delete all the data, which it probably did.

 

[popatim]

You need to understand how SSD's work to hopefully understand the situation. This is rather simplified... Internally they maintain a huge table of the drive. One side of this table is the old sector/track info that it passes to the OS; the other side is the addresses of all the flash cells. Which cells get written to or read from are completely at the discretion of the SSD's controller. Windows only cares about the Sector/Blocks addressing. As you use your drive the SSD controller will move data around internally but it only updates the flash address side of the table. Sometime this is for wear leveling, sometimes its to write 0's to cell blocks where you've deleted a file. (SSD's cannot erase individual cells, they have to erase the entire block of cells, moving non-deleted files as needed). SSD's also have a built in service called Garbage collection who's sole job is to handle this process while Trim, a command issued by the OS, pretty much forces it to 'Run now'.

HDD's don't need to erase the actual physical location of your data on the platters. They simply mark it as 'empty' in the sector/track map and then overwrite the data that is there when it gets used again. Note that the actual data did not get deleted, it's still sitting there on the platters.

This is why Recovery works so well on HDD's and so poorly on SSD's.
And why you really need to have backups of anything important stored on an SSD.

Now I'm thinking nothing you attempted worked because the SSD's internal cell-map has corrupted for those partitions or that the flash controller itself is unable to access those cells. If its table corruption you might be able to let the drive sort itself out by letting it sit for a few hours powered on without the sata cable connected, not an easy thing to do in a laptop. Perhaps hitting the pause button during startup and before it gets to loading Windows would be enough. I've only seen this work a couple of times though myself.

 

[papayoyo]

You need to understand how SSD's work to hopefully understand the situation. This is rather simplified... Internally they maintain a huge table of the drive. One side of this table is the old sector/track info that it passes to the OS; the other side is the addresses of all the flash cells. Which cells get written to or read from are completely at the discretion of the SSD's controller. Windows only cares about the Sector/Blocks addressing. As you use your drive the SSD controller will move data around internally but it only updates the flash address side of the table. Sometime this is for wear leveling, sometimes its to write 0's to cell blocks where you've deleted a file. (SSD's cannot erase individual cells, they have to erase the entire block of cells, moving non-deleted files as needed). SSD's also have a built in service called Garbage collection who's sole job is to handle this process while Trim, a command issued by the OS, pretty much forces it to 'Run now'.

HDD's don't need to erase the actual physical location of your data on the platters. They simply mark it as 'empty' in the sector/track map and then overwrite the data that is there when it gets used again. Note that the actual data did not get deleted, it's still sitting there on the platters.

This is why Recovery works so well on HDD's and so poorly on SSD's.
And why you really need to have backups of anything important stored on an SSD.

Now I'm thinking nothing you attempted worked because the SSD's internal cell-map has corrupted for those partitions or that the flash controller itself is unable to access those cells. If its table corruption you might be able to let the drive sort itself out by letting it sit for a few hours powered on without the sata cable connected, not an easy thing to do in a laptop. Perhaps hitting the pause button during startup and before it gets to loading Windows would be enough. I've only seen this work a couple of times though myself.

Thanks for the explanation. Hopefully it's just table corruption, as some of the partitions are still ok. I already tried leaving it plugged in for power but not data for half an hour, to no avail. Will try leaving it longer.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you used diskpart clean command and then formatted the drive, that pretty much killed any chances of getting old data back from the drive. I doubt even a data recovery service will be able to get it back.

 

[papayoyo]

If you used diskpart clean command and then formatted the drive, that pretty much killed any chances of getting old data back from the drive. I doubt even a data recovery service will be able to get it back.

It didn't do anything though, just returned an error message about drive being inaccessible. The drive appears to be exactly as it was before. I just did it out of sheer frustration after several days of trying TestDisk, MiniTool, Partition Recovery toolkit, Easus Partition Master, Active Partition Recovery, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you used diskpart clean command and then formatted the drive, that pretty much killed any chances of getting old data back from the drive. I doubt even a data recovery service will be able to get it back.

It didn't do anything though, just returned an error message about drive being inaccessible. The drive appears to be exactly as it was before. I just did it out of sheer frustration after several days of trying TestDisk, MiniTool, Partition Recovery toolkit, Easus Partition Master, Active Partition Recovery, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

Then it seems there is a hardware issue with the drive.