Question SMART has triggered, "Read only"ing my drive because Available Spare is 0%? But only EFI needs repair

[Argus97]

So, this has been a nightmare for about two weeks now. Computer just crashed randomly, couldn't even boot. Was told "WARNING: Please back-up your data and replace your hard drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail." It set my SSD to read only through SMART and I couldn't do anything. I made a new install of windows and have been struggling with data recovery when windows popped up with a message about "Your drive needs to be repaired." I opened the notification, and it brought me to Disks & Volumes, scrolling to my old SSD it says "Warning: Issues Detected" but only for the FAT32 EFI partition, which claims "Full repair needed" while my Data partition and recovery partition are listed as "Healthy"

SO I followed a guide on how to repair the EFI bootloader, now I'm wondering if my drive isn't about to die? It says it's an issue about my "Available Spare" being 0% but maybe that's fixable? I got into my windows recovery and followed this guide until it got to "bootrec /FixBoot" where it then said "ACCESS DENIED" Now I'm so confused, how do I get around this "Read Only" SMART stuff? Is my drive REALLY failing? It's reporting 96% remaining life, and I've had it under 8 months.

In addition, through this menu in settings, I was able to mount the drive but can't access my "User" profile, since it says I don't have permission, and when I try to inherit permission, it says it's failed because the device is in Read Only. How am I supposed to backup my stuff if it's in read only?? Sorry, this has just been so frustrating, and now the hope of being able to just get my drive back up and running has gotten my hopes up.

Here's a few screenshots of the settings

https://imgur.com/a/nwBL7hw

View: https://imgur.com/a/nwBL7hw


Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[Colif]

How am I supposed to backup my stuff if it's in read only??

if this is windows 10, this might work
go into settings/update & security/recovery
under Advanced Startup, click restart now
this will restart windows in a blue menu

• choose troubleshoot
  
• choose advanced
  
• choose command prompt
  
• type notepad and press enter
  
• in notepad, select file>open
  
• Use file explorer to copy any files you need to save to USB or another drive
  

that might get around the permissions problem
Another is to use a linux USB and copy the info across in linux as it doesn't care about windows permissions.

Try running Magician on the drive and see what it reports - https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/
but obviously you can't install that on a drive that is read only

Sounds to me like you need to RMA the Nvme to Samsung and get a new one from them... it has 5 year warranty.

 

[fzabkar]

The SSD has become read-only because it has exhausted its supply of spare blocks. You need to recover your data before it fails completely. The easiest way would be to boot from a Linux distro on a USB stick and then recover the data to another drive.

If the drive develops readability problems, you could clone it with HDDSuperClone or ddrescue.

 

[Argus97]

The SSD has become read-only because it has exhausted its supply of spare blocks.

Sorry, I don't really understand how this works. Why would it run out of spare blocks if it's got 96% life expected left? Does that just mean it's faulty, or that the EFI blocks got corrupted? Is there any way to free up blocks? And how can I prevent my new drive from running out of spare blocks?

 

[SkyNetRising]

Sorry, I don't really understand how this works. Why would it run out of spare blocks if it's got 96% life expected left? Does that just mean it's faulty, or that the EFI blocks got corrupted? Is there any way to free up blocks? And how can I prevent my new drive from running out of spare blocks?

Diagnose the drive with Samsung Magician.
If SSD has exhausted all write cycles, it locks itself (becomes read only). You can't write to it anymore.
You can only recover your data and replace your drive.

 

[fzabkar]

Sorry, I don't really understand how this works. Why would it run out of spare blocks if it's got 96% life expected left? Does that just mean it's faulty, or that the EFI blocks got corrupted? Is there any way to free up blocks? And how can I prevent my new drive from running out of spare blocks?

An SSD's life is normally estimated on the basis of Program/Erase cycles or TBW (terabytes written). I expect that the SSD has consumed 4% of its rated P/E cycles, so your SMART tool reports the available life left as 96%.