Question Samsung SSD C Drive Wiped Clean?

psquared76

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Yesterday, I had my computer up...working fine...stepped away for a minute and came back to find the "reboot and select proper boot device" message.

I've never encountered this before, so of course I did a search to find recommended troubleshooting steps...I followed them and nothing resolved the issue.

So today I pulled the C drive out (samsung SSD) and installed in another computer. The drive appears to be empty.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is this something that can happen to these drives as a failure mode...or was this some sort of malware? I still can't believe it happened.
 

psquared76

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It (probably) didn't just 'wipe' itself.

Put the system back together as original.

What other drives are/were in this system?

There is another HD used for storage...it's still in the case.

For added info, I had gone into BIOS and confirmed the boot priority was correct. Tried rebooting and still no luck. I then went into BIOS and restored defaults...still no luck.

I can put the drive back in the PC. What steps would you recommend next?

Why does the drive appear empty when viewed in a different computer (looking at in CMD with diskpart info...it says it's all free space)?
 

psquared76

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If you can get Windows up and running, post a screencap of your Disk Management window.

Upload to imgur.com, and post the link here.

Not sure how to get windows up and running...but I plugged everything back in as it was. Got into CMD with windows loader USB, and ran diskpart and then "list volume"...the original C drive does not show up. My backup storage hard drive does though...it's listed and shown as "healthy".

It made me wonder if the power or sata connection was bad, so I unplugged the extra hard drive and plugged my old C drive into it's connectors...after this, it was still not found with diskpart and list volume.

The drive is seen in BIOS as connected (it's listed as an available boot device), but it doesn't seem like windows sees it. Any ideas what could cause this?
 

psquared76

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Reinstall windnows (have only single drive connected, when you do that).
What model SSD is it? (Samsung is manufacturer, not a model name)

It's a Samsung 850 EVO 500 gb.

Is the suggestion to attempt to reinstall windows on the drive that's giving me problems? Or to install on a 2nd drive...and then once Windows is functional, to connect my old drive and look at "disk management"?
 
Is the suggestion to attempt to reinstall windows on the drive that's giving me problems?
Or to install on a 2nd drive...and then once Windows is functional, to connect my old drive and look at "disk management"?
Depends.
If you need to recover any data from old drive, then install on another drive.
Installing windows on a drive, overwrites it and makes old data unrecoverable.

BTW - it's also possible, your old drive has died and you will not be able to install windows on it.
 
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psquared76

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Depends.
If you need to recover any data from old drive, then install on another drive.
Installing windows on a drive, overwrites it and makes old data unrecoverable.

BTW - it's also possible, your old drive has died and you will not be able to install windows on it.

I was hoping to get access to files on it...so didn't want to try a fresh install over it.

I've purchased a HD dock...and I'm getting a message that the file format is not recognized by windows and I must format it before it's readable.

If I format the drive, is there a data recovery tool anyone would recommend to see if I can still access the old files?
 

psquared76

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I would absolutely not count on that. At all.

This is specifically what backups of your data is for.
Your data should never be at the mercy of a single storage device.

I'm not counting on it...the majority of my files (all contents of "documents" folder) are backed up...all is fine.

At first i was just, taken unawares from the drive failure...now I'm back up and running on a different PC and just trying to see what I can do with this drive.
 

psquared76

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HD dock? What are you doing with it?
Do you intend to install windows on external drive? Probably not going to happen.

I don't intend to install windows again on the drive in question. Even if I could, I wouldn't have faith in it...as I don't know why it failed to begin with.

At this point, I bought the dock to see if I could still access files on the drive, and sort of play around with it without having to goof around installing in the case of the computer I'm now using (which I've already done, and then removed it, and then reinstalled in the original case, and then moved it to a new sata and power connector...etc, etc, etc.).