[SOLVED] SSD and HDD both seem dead with no aparent reason.

JefersonEuclides

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Jan 14, 2014
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Last Monday, February 17th, I got home and turned on my computer. A desktop machine with W10. Everything is fine, I log in into my user, Chrome opens up automatically - as I left it open the last shut down - with some tabs loaded: a YouTube video, WhatsApp and something else. The video is playing normally, I'm not interested so I switch tabs to WhatsApp; everything immediately frozes and that's where this story begins.

I could move my mouse and my the keyboard was partially answering (Num / Caps lock were turning on / off), but Chrome and the explorer were both completely frozen. That's not normal as I own a pretty decent machine, so I wait a few seconds and decide to call Task Manager, I hit Ctrl Alt Del, wait a few seconds, and blue screen comes instead of the Task Manager.

The new blue screen of W10 collects some data and then restarts your machine, but this time the data collector was stuck as 0%. I waited a few minutes, nothing changed, so I forced a shut down by keeping pressed the start button on my case.

Computer turns off, I turn it on right after and to my surprise it went directly to the Motherboard Bios. I thought it was weird, so I turn it off again and on, but same thing happens.

I went to Bios order and to my surprise again, nothing was listed. I couldn't see either my SSD (main storage with system) nor my HDD (stuff).

Here is a list of things I did:
  • Wait a few minutes with PSU turned off;
  • Swirch SATA cables, even tried a new one, so three cables were tested;
  • Try one HD at a time;
  • Use another PSU cable / connector;
Nothing got any of the HDs recognized by my motherboard. Only thing my motherboard recognized was a pen drive I connected to the USB just for reasons...

Without enough tools I grabbed both HDs and went to local shop, asking them to check if they were alive. Result is nope, both are "kind of" dead: the SSD was recognized once, but never again, and when recognized it was not possible to see any data. HDD was recognized all times,but no data was seen.

I get back home and try to use the HDD from another computer on my machine, and to my surprise it wasn't recognized by my motherboard... I tried both HDs on this other machine, and it couldn't recognize them either.

As I have a laptop I've been working on it and only during the weekend I'll be able to do new tests. First thing I'll do is buy a new cheap HDD, disconnect absolutely everything, connect only the needed and check if the new HDD is recognized.

The reason I'm posting this is to check if any of you have any ideas on things I could try. Aside from what I mentioned the only option that I have in mind is buying new stuff.

I've read that Windows Update had done similar things in the past. I updated my W10 last Friday night. I used the computer all Saturday afternoon with no problems, then on Monday it all happened.

These are the specs:

I5-8400 COFFEE LAKE
GIGABYTE INTEL LGA 1151 B360M
NVIDIA MSI GEFORCE GTX 1070 TI TITANIUM 8G
SD KINGSTON 2.5 240GB A400 SATA III
SEAGATE HDD 1TB 7200 RPM
16 GB RAM
 
Solution
What can I say - your data backup is good to have ?

It's very rare two different devices goes bad simultaneously, so I can guess that the PSU have something with that to do (got bad, or there was a sudden voltage spike from main voltage for some unknown reason)
What can I say - your data backup is good to have ?

It's very rare two different devices goes bad simultaneously, so I can guess that the PSU have something with that to do (got bad, or there was a sudden voltage spike from main voltage for some unknown reason)
 
Solution

JefersonEuclides

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Jan 14, 2014
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10,630
What can I say - your data backup is good to have ?

It's very rare two different devices goes bad simultaneously, so I can guess that the PSU have something with that to do (got bad, or there was a sudden voltage spike from main voltage for some unknown reason)

Yes, I'm a developer so all projects are on a repository. I will be losing mostly old stuff, like university stuff or random pictures. Kinda sad though.

Yes PSU was the first thing that came to my mind, and actually could still be a problem, as I said it didn't recognize a working HD from another computer.

Well, guess I should be preparing my pocket for unforeseen expenses...
 

JefersonEuclides

Honorable
Jan 14, 2014
77
0
10,630
What can I say - your data backup is good to have ?

It's very rare two different devices goes bad simultaneously, so I can guess that the PSU have something with that to do (got bad, or there was a sudden voltage spike from main voltage for some unknown reason)

Marking this one as the best response, however it's good to mention what happened:

First of all, yes SSD was dead for good, nothing that I could do; I bought a new SSD and installed Windows all over again, however this is where things get interesting: the HDD was not dead, seems like windows has some sort of defense mechanism that "binds" folders to an Administrator user.

After resetting all the security rules on the HDD I started seeing my old stuff. Basically it was just Windows blocking any folder from view (even through advanced methods) on other machines...