Definite SSD failure or MBR issue?

grabmyrooster

Reputable
Sep 1, 2014
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I was running out of space on my main SSD before installing Overwatch, so I decided to compress the disk at my friend's suggestion. The disk compression went fine and the PC continued running until I went to bed Monday night. Tuesday I wasn't home after work and so this morning was the first time I could boot up the machine (running Windows 7 professional) and play some Overwatch again. Well, on start-up I got "BOOTMGR is compressed. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart."

Dreading this error, I plugged in my emergency diag drive, which is the 20GB hard drive running Ubuntu 12.04 that I'm currently on. I tried fixmbr, I tried bootrec, I tried rebuildbcd after getting BCD errors on startup, to no avail. Then, I checked in the Ubuntu disk utility and saw what's in the screenshots. Notice how it's not even showing up anymore in devices (drive label was "Main SSD") and it shows a blank 120GB volume in the disk utility.

Is this drive truly failing? Is all of my data gone because I neglected to back it all up? Or is there some hope that I can at least recover the data? I plan on replacing the SSD with a larger one anyway.
 
Solution


I found out what the issue was. After discovering I was attempting to repair the wrong drive (they're both 120GB SSDs and the drive label is usually C: on my main drive, but the two were swapped in the recovery menu), I was able to fix at least the formatting issue. It wasn't reading that the drive was formatted NTFS. After tinkering around and running chkdsk a few different ways, the recovery command prompt was finally able to see the drive properly. The first boot sector was corrupted, so chkdsk loaded from the...
You have to decompress essential files needed to load windows.
Boot from windows installation media, go to Recover my computer/command prompt
and use compact utility to decompress your files.

  • compact /U C:\bootmgr

(That is syntax how to decompress bootmgr. It might be necessary to decompress other files also.)
 

Would that fix the BCD issue it's currently having or the issues in these screenshots? (forgot to add them to the initial post)

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I found out what the issue was. After discovering I was attempting to repair the wrong drive (they're both 120GB SSDs and the drive label is usually C: on my main drive, but the two were swapped in the recovery menu), I was able to fix at least the formatting issue. It wasn't reading that the drive was formatted NTFS. After tinkering around and running chkdsk a few different ways, the recovery command prompt was finally able to see the drive properly. The first boot sector was corrupted, so chkdsk loaded from the second boot sector and copied that over the corrupt first boot sector, which would allow it to boot. Then it actually checked the files, and it took about an hour to go through and repair a few damaged files. Afterwards, it gave me a lovely message that it had repaired all booting issues. I restarted, got a few warnings about my MBR being screwy (which it is now, due to old OS's showing up and several copies of Ubuntu scattered around), and was able to log in to my main SSD again. I've decompressed all the files and moved a bunch of stuff off of it to free up space. I'll be replacing it within a month at the latest. Thanks for the help!
 
Solution