(SOLVED)Experts on Hidden/Locked/Frozen(?) SSD/mSATA drives. Only shows 32kb but is 480GB

[Resto_Ron]

Hello All,
I am new to posting here but have been reading a lot of great information on this site for a while now. Because of the level of knowledge here I am bring this problem to you.
I have a Mushkin\Atlas mSATA 480 GB drive in a laptop that just stopped showing up. I turned the laptop on about a week ago and I got a black screen message "search for media failed" three times. I popped in the WIN 10 ISO disc and looked in the CMD and I saw that there was only a disc of 32kb. I used the Parted Magic Live disc to check and got the same information. In the NWIPE portion of the live environment I could see two areas one /dev/sdb 3276 bytes and another /dev/srl with 352321536 bytes but nothing else. Just to see what I could I looked in the laptop UEFI and there was no disc at all, I also checked it in legacy mode. In the live CD I tried to use the secure erase and got the message that the disc was locked and Parted Magic needed to reboot, so I did. When I got back into the live environment I was informed that the disc was still locked and needed to reboot, and on......I moved the mSATA over to my freshly built PC and in the UEFI/BIOS the disc was listed. The motherboard in the PC is an ASRock Z170 K6 and the laptop is the factory mobo with an i7 3632QM CPU. It is almost like there is a small partition acting as a wall keeping me from the rest of the disc. I do not need to worry about the information on the disc but would like to be able to use it. An RMA is not an option as this disc is out of warranty by 6.5 months. I am sure some of you know what I can do to rectify this dilemma I just am not knowledgeable enough to figure it out and need help.
Thank you for reading and ANY help/suggestions on what I should try is greatly appreciated.
RR

 

[lakimens]

You need to format it through CMD using disk part:
Open CMD
diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign
exit

This is what I use on my usb that becomes 20kb in size.(for usb use fs=fat32)
I think it should work for ssd too.
Anyone experienced here to confirm?

 

[Resto_Ron]

You need to format it through CMD using disk part:
Open CMD
diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign
exit

This is what I use on my usb that becomes 20kb in size.(for usb use fs=fat32)
I think it should work for ssd too.
Anyone experienced here to confirm?

lakimens,
Thanks for the response. I tried your suggestion and what I got back was "Diskpart has encountered an error: The semaphore timeout period has expired." Then I was told to look at the system event log for more information. I looked in the log and found "The IO operation at logical block 0x0 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\000000065) was retired." Then a bunch more entries just like it with different block #s. If any one can instruct me on how to post pix I would do that as well.
Thanks!

 

[Resto_Ron]

You need to format it through CMD using disk part:
Open CMD
diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign
exit

This is what I use on my usb that becomes 20kb in size.(for usb use fs=fat32)
I think it should work for ssd too.
Anyone experienced here to confirm?

Hey I tried a second time and got this new message:

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 894 GB 0 B
Disk 3 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 6 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 7 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 8 Online 32 KB 32 KB

DISKPART> sel disk 8

Disk 8 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> create partition primary

Virtual Disk Service error:
There is not enough usable space for this operation.

 

[lakimens]

I am sorry, I can't help you with your errors, when I used that, I used it for usb as i said before, and it worked.

 

[Resto_Ron]

I am sorry, I can't help you with your errors, when I used that, I used it for usb as i said before, and it worked.

Thanks for trying. Hopefully someone else will chime in and be able to help.

 

[Resto_Ron]

Ok, after racking my brain I figured out a way to "UNLOCK" this drive. I used the same process that is used to reset fake USB drives. You can find this process in several places on the net. Basically you rewrite the controller of the drive back to what it was from the factory. I used an adapter to plug the mSATA into a USB port then used Chip Genius to find the info I needed then followed the rest of the steps and it worked!!!!! Even though I did not get the answer from this forum I thought I would leave the answer here incase it can help someone in the future.
Thanks,
RR

 

[jackxu388]

Hi Resto_Ron
I am facing same problem as your case, see you have solved your problem, need your help
my sad is 120GB, maybe doing something wrong, now only 32kb shows up/

can you give some advise.
thanks

 

[billthekirk]

I tried the above too and my drive is still showing as 480 MB instead of 480 GB. WHAT THE HECK?!?!?!?