Question M.2 NVMe Boot SSD locked in Read-Only

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Mar 28, 2023
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Hello, I want to apologize in advance because this will be a little longform. The drive in question is a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB solid state NVMe drive.

Yesterday, while watching Netflix on my PC, Firefox suddenly froze up and then went back to normal. Didn't think anything of it, went to boot up a game and then Steam and Firefox both froze up again. Figured maybe I had my computer on for too long, so I decided to shut it down and start back up. After doing so, I was taken straight to UEFI BIOS. The drive was detected and listed under SSDs (along with both of my HDDs), but it wouldn't show up as my boot drive, which I found weird. Tried pulling the card out of the PC and putting it back in to no avail.

Decided on a whim to try and enable CSM for Legacy and reboot. Upon this, I get a system message telling me that no bootable media was found on the boot drive, and to put boot media on the device and press a key to continue. When I rebooted and went back into BIOS, the drive now shows up as my boot drive but the previous mentioned error persists when I try to boot to Windows. I'm kind of confused as to why this makes my boot drive show up, because it was formatted with GPT and not MBR. Diskpart's disk list reflects this fact.

Figuring something was aloof, I went and made a Windows media USB and popped it in so I could try some things on there in the hopes that it would do something to get me going again. When I try Windows startup repair, it searches for errors for about five seconds and then reports back that it couldn't repair any errors.

Opened command prompt, went to diskpart and everything appears to be in order there. All of my disks show up as online. SMART shows OK all across the board.
Went to run chkdsk, and while it is able to scan and identify issues, the /f /r /x commands don't work. When attempted, the command returns a message stating that it cannot be completed because the drive is write-protected.
When attempting to run sfc, it can identify issues when using the /verifyonly command, but using sfc /scannow reports back that "Windows Resource Protection was unable to complete the request" after it finishes the scan.
Using Diskpart to clear the read-only attribute doesn't work as the issue persists, and I'm not sure what to try to get sfc and chkdsk to work.

There appears to be something wrong with the file system, but I can't figure out what to do to fix it. The only thing I haven't done is attempt to change the read-only value in the registry. I've not attempted to back any of my media up either, as I don't believe I can move any of the data over to a portable drive due to the write protection. Is there anyway I can fix this without having to put in a new SSD?

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
Can you show us a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl? I suspect that your drive has run out out of spare sectors and has recorded many Media and Data Integrity Errors. The firmware would then have switched to read-only mode to protect your data.
 
Any advice would be appreciated.
Install windows on some other drive and diagnose your 970 evo with samsung magician.

I'd suspect your drive has locked itself and will show drive health as critical.
Like here:
CSaa8acv-DjQ-mfh0xPvtwrGtXqGvFUAo5vFg3PThss.jpg

Then your only option is to replace it.
Or RMA, if you still have warranty.

Note - all the data is still available on the drive. You can't erase it.
So, if you have important/sensitive personal information on the drive, then RMA may not be an option.
 
Mar 28, 2023
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Can you show us a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl? I suspect that your drive has run out out of spare sectors and has recorded many Media and Data Integrity Errors. The firmware would then have switched to read-only mode to protect your data.

I'm not sure that I'd be able to run CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl, as I'm unable to get into Windows as this is my main drive. If this is something I can do with the Windows install media, then I'll try it. The drive is only a little over half-full, could it still run out of spare sectors regardless of that?
 
Sep 29, 2023
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This happened to me now the second time in ~12 months. First with a Samsung 970EVO Plus, now with a Kingston.
I´m wondering, might it be

  • too much heat?
  • Or me never shutting off the PC but rather going into hibernation?
Both NVME SSD´s were 1TB and after some time with bluescreens I wasn´t able to boot to windows anymore, because windows was not able to write to the read-only disk. I have the Gigabyte 5510I Aorus Pro AX in a veryvery tiny case, and read some articles about too much heat for the ssd´s with the Motherboards SSD cooler?!
 

USAFRet

Titan
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This happened to me now the second time in ~12 months. First with a Samsung 970EVO Plus, now with a Kingston.
I´m wondering, might it be

  • too much heat?
  • Or me never shutting off the PC but rather going into hibernation?
Both NVME SSD´s were 1TB and after some time with bluescreens I wasn´t able to boot to windows anymore, because windows was not able to write to the read-only disk. I have the Gigabyte 5510I Aorus Pro AX in a veryvery tiny case, and read some articles about too much heat for the ssd´s with the Motherboards SSD cooler?!
Please start a NEW thread for your specific situation. This one is many months old.
 
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