Question Gen 4 M.2 suddenly won't boot after months of working fine

[deankenny]

So got a lovely new gen 4 m.2, and after installing it, disabling CSM and all that fun stuff, I managed to get windows installed on it and off I went, been using it now with no problems for months without issue.
Then all of a sudden trying to boot today the system just goes directly to bios, the m.2 drive is shown in bios as connected and present but no matter what I do it doesn't boot to windows, only ever into bios.
I tired resetting the boot keys, reset the cmos and so on but yet still boots to bios.

So I have now installed my old sata ssd, and below is a screenshot of disc management, does this mean the gen4 m.2 is dead?
(Disk 0 is the m.2 gen4 drive)

 

[SkyNetRising]

So I have now installed my old sata ssd, and below is a screenshot of disc management, does this mean the gen4 m.2 is dead?

It's not dead. Partition table got overwritten and it appears as unitialized now.

Do you need to recover data?
If not, then initialize, repartition and reformat.

You may want to turn of fast boot in bios and fast startup in windows (to prevent same thing happening again).

 

[deankenny]

It's not dead. Partition table got overwritten and it appears as unitialized now.

Do you need to recover data?
If not, then initialize, repartition and reformat.

You may want to turn of fast boot in bios and fast startup in windows (to prevent same thing happening again).

I most certainly need to keep my data, installs, files and so forth.
Is there no way to get back into the drive without having to wipe it?

 

[mdd1963]

If it has died, then it won't reinitialize and will not be usable (in either M.2 NVME slot if your computer has more than one), and, the computer will be fine once that NVME is replaced...

You might not know more until attempting to reinitialize/reformat it...or moving/swapping it.

 

[deankenny]

Awaiting SkyNet response, before going any further.

 

[deankenny]

Ffor a start which of these 2 options shall I select?

 

[deankenny]

Please anyone, I'm really stuck right now

 

[deankenny]

I have tried and tried to wipe and reinstall windows, but the drive will not play ball, create partitions, wipe or anything, and eventually disapears completely from the list??

 

[SkyNetRising]

Now it appears dead.
RMA.

 

[deankenny]

Yep, seems this m.2 is known for failing, exhibiting the same symptoms as i've had across numerous posts over the net, blue screens, WHEA errors, which I always assumed was my cpu/bios need updating, freezing and random restarts, again I associated all this to the CPU. Now I got my old ssd in my system and i've not had 1 freeze/stutter/restart yet.

Only annoying thing about RMA, is that they send a replacement of the same product, which I WILL NOT ever be using again after this as i've lost alot of files, game installs, photos etc due to this.
Looks like I will buy another 2tb m.2 from another brand and sell the rma'ed replacement as and when i receive it.

 

[Flayed]

Yep, seems this m.2 is known for failing, exhibiting the same symptoms as i've had across numerous posts over the net, blue screens, WHEA errors, which I always assumed was my cpu/bios need updating, freezing and random restarts, again I associated all this to the CPU. Now I got my old ssd in my system and i've not had 1 freeze/stutter/restart yet.

Only annoying thing about RMA, is that they send a replacement of the same product, which I WILL NOT ever be using again after this as i've lost alot of files, game installs, photos etc due to this.
Looks like I will buy another 2tb m.2 from another brand and sell the rma'ed replacement as and when i receive it.

I think for SSDs go with Samsung or Crucial.

 

[SkyNetRising]

What make/model was this one, that failed?

 

[deankenny]

What make/model was this one, that failed?

I have done some googling and found some other users with the same symptoms as me with this very same m.2, they receive random restarts, whea errors etc, and all of them same as me blamed the CPU, until finally their m.2 completely failed like me, and again like me upon installing an old ssd all the whea errors and random restarts have now gone away.

 

[deankenny]

After some more research, I believe these Gen4 drives are not ready yet, they produce enough heat by themselves, however when put into the slot directly above a GPU reaching 70-75c under heavy gaming (RTX3080) then the m.2 is going to get some serious heat!!! Even with the heatsink corsair supplied with this particular model, it seemed the heat has killed it, but obvisiously Corsair selling spheel says it's fine due to their heatsink.

I think, I am not going to get another gen4 m.2 to replace it, and next one will be without a heatsink and go in the slot below the gpu using the mobos pre installed heatsink, as I have a lion li case with 3 fans sucking cool air straight up in from the bottom of the case.