Samsung Magician Secure-Erase

[Needy McNeed]

I have a specific situation that I need help with, if someone would be so kind.

I recently built a PC and everything went fairly well, except my 960 Evo, which I use as my boot drive for Windows 10 and various programs, was picked up by the MoBo as disk 1 instead of disk 0 because I had an HDD plugged in as well when I installed the OS, and the first few times I tried to boot the SSD wasn't detected but the HDD was, so I had to remove the GPU and the SSD heat shield, stick the things back in the board, etc., and finally it worked. This result was annoying, but disk 1 seems to work fine as the boot drive so I left it alone. But now after about two weeks of messing with stuff and adding programs, everything on the system feels sluggish and I'm getting blue screen crashes out of games and stuff; I turn the computer on and have to hit the physical reset button to get it to boot up; just various terrible stuff. I've run the Windows file checker command thing and it says everything is fine, but something is definitely not fine.

So I want to secure-erase the 960 Evo and then reinstall Windows on it, but I'll have the HDD unplugged when I boot up my Windows USB so hopefully the SSD will register as disk 0. My big question is ... should I do this or is it overkill? Would it be just as good to use the reinstall options within Windows without messing with the SSD itself? Is it worth it to get my boot drive to be disk 0? I've read elsewhere that I can use Samsung's Magician software to secure-erase the Evo from a bootable thumb drive, then restart into windows to format the drive. But if the wiped SSD was the Windows boot drive, where will I end up when I restart? Can I just pop the thumb drive Windows 10 came on and choose the Evo as my boot drive and format from there? Sorry for the length of this, I just want to make sure I'm getting the full situation across. I don't want to ruin everything.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Seanie280672]

I have a specific situation that I need help with, if someone would be so kind.

I recently built a PC and everything went fairly well, except my 960 Evo, which I use as my boot drive for Windows 10 and various programs, was picked up by the MoBo as disk 1 instead of disk 0 because I had an HDD plugged in as well when I installed the OS, and the first few times I tried to boot the SSD wasn't detected but the HDD was, so I had to remove the GPU and the SSD heat shield, stick the things back in the board, etc., and finally it worked. This result was annoying, but disk 1 seems to work fine as the boot drive so I left it alone. But now after about two weeks of messing with stuff and adding programs, everything on the system feels sluggish and I'm getting blue screen crashes out of games and stuff; I turn the computer on and have to hit the physical reset button to get it to boot up; just various terrible stuff. I've run the Windows file checker command thing and it says everything is fine, but something is definitely not fine.

So I want to secure-erase the 960 Evo and then reinstall Windows on it, but I'll have the HDD unplugged when I boot up my Windows USB so hopefully the SSD will register as disk 0. My big question is ... should I do this or is it overkill? Would it be just as good to use the reinstall options within Windows without messing with the SSD itself? Is it worth it to get my boot drive to be disk 0? I've read elsewhere that I can use Samsung's Magician software to secure-erase the Evo from a bootable thumb drive, then restart into windows to format the drive. But if the wiped SSD was the Windows boot drive, where will I end up when I restart? Can I just pop the thumb drive Windows 10 came on and choose the Evo as my boot drive and format from there? Sorry for the length of this, I just want to make sure I'm getting the full situation across. I don't want to ruin everything.

Thanks for any help.

This is a big problem for Samsung at the moment, and they are getting a lot of complaints about it, currently there is no way to secure erase the evo 960 nvme drives without booting into windows on another hard drive and setting the nvme drive as a secondary drive, theres no bootable secure erase utility for the 960 evo's unless something has changed since I last looked it up, if you have any info on this, please correct me.

My motherboard itself has a built in secure erase utility and fails to secure erase these drives too, I think the problem lies with the fact that most bioses now-a-days locks / freezes the drives, the old way around it with SSD's was to hot plug them pull the power cord out of the drive, leave it out for about 10 seconds and then plug it back in, this would un-freeze the drive and secure erase would continue, thats not possible with these drives as they are connected directly to the motherboard.

For now, like you said, shut down the computer, unplug your other hard drive so you just have the evo 960 left in the system and boot of the Windows USB installation media, when it comes to select which drive you would like to install windows too, delete all of the existing partitions, theres probably 3 of them, they'll be recover, the main part of the drive and efi partition, delete all of them until it just shows 1 drive of unpartitioned space and then click next, windows installation will do the rest, dont plug in your other hard drive until windows is at the desktop.

 

[Needy McNeed]

Thanks Seanie. This is helpful. I'm wondering, though, if reformatting the Evo like you say, from the Windows USB stick, will leave remnants of whatever issues I have going on now. Would that basically be the same thing as using the fresh start options from within the OS to just reinstall Windows? In which case, maybe leaving the EVO as a disk 1 boot drive is ok? I'm still not sure what's actually wrong with the computer. Something tells me there are GPU issues. I was trying to run Heaven to benchmark the GTX 1070 and it would crash after a few minutes each time. But up to that point I was getting what looked like decent performance. This is a Ryzen 7 1700 system. All hardware drivers are up to date and my BIOS is current. I've got an MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon MoBo and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM. I haven't messed with overclocking anything yet, or even brought the RAM up to speed. Any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[Seanie280672]

Thanks Seanie. This is helpful. I'm wondering, though, if reformatting the Evo like you say, from the Windows USB stick, will leave remnants of whatever issues I have going on now. Would that basically be the same thing as using the fresh start options from within the OS to just reinstall Windows? In which case, maybe leaving the EVO as a disk 1 boot drive is ok? I'm still not sure what's actually wrong with the computer. Something tells me there are GPU issues. I was trying to run Heaven to benchmark the GTX 1070 and it would crash after a few minutes each time. But up to that point I was getting what looked like decent performance. This is a Ryzen 7 1700 system. All hardware drivers are up to date and my BIOS is current. I've got an MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon MoBo and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM. I haven't messed with overclocking anything yet, or even brought the RAM up to speed. Any suggestions? Thanks!

This is why I say delete the partitions first, that will clear all data on the drive, a fresh start.

Funny enough you are running the same setup as me, just different ram, was your ram brought as a kit ? have your tried testing your ram ? have you tried just 2 sticks ?

 

[Needy McNeed]

Nice! I've got two 16GB sticks that came as a set. I've got them in the recommended slots. I searched and read about the Windows memory diagnostic tool after you suggested testing the RAM, so I'll run that when I get home later.

Sorry, I'm a total novice. This is my first PC-building experience and I've learned the little I know through Google searches, YouTube videos, and forum discussions. Prior to this I'd been using the same iMac since 2008, so, ya know, I'm Needy McNeed, man.

I built this computer to do video editing with Adobe CC and gaming, so I'd like to get it running as fast as possible while also maintaining stability. I'm getting the "page fault in non-paged area" blue screen in Civ 6 occasionally, although I put Steam on my HDD, not the SSD. I think I've just gone about downloading things and organizing them incorrectly. I should probably start over.

 

[Seanie280672]

http://www.memtest86.com download mem test for free, bootable USB or bootable cd version, shutdown your computer and remove the stick from slot B2, boot from the cd or USB and leave it to test the stick in A2 for about an hour, then shut down again, and test the other stick in A2 for about an hour, if any errors are found, you'll know which one is playing up, you can always test them as a pair too just to make sure afterwards that it's not the ram slot itself.

 

[Needy McNeed]

Ah, yes, MemTest86. I will get that and use it. Thanks, I just updated my post above while you were replying to me. This has been really helpful.