Troubleshooting Samsung 850 Pro SSD -- BSOD crash, ssd not found in BIOS, Windows says it's locked?

[ohioutod]

Thanks in advance for anyone's help with this, I've been searching and googling all over the place trying to solve this but I can't quite figure out what's going on.

I've had a Samsung 850 Pro 256 gb drive for about a year and it's worked great. I have Windows 8.1 installed on the SSD and use it as the primary storage drive in my system. A few days ago I was playing a game and experienced a sudden BSOD crash (which is very unusual for me, I get one a year max). Upon restart, Windows gave an error saying that the required device was not connected.

I booted into repair mode via CD/DVD, and Windows told me I had no copies of windows installed. Diskpart could not find the drive. Upon booting into BIOS, I found that BIOS showed nothing plugged into the SATA port. I again rebooted into repair mode -- interestingly, it appeared that somehow my secondary HDD had been renamed from E: to C: -- while it was still functioning, the SSD was named C. Chkdsk believed C: to be my platter HDD, and told me my E: drive was locked. (Does this mean Windows can somehow see another drive is connected, or is this just a wrong error code?)

Thinking that the problem could still maybe be easily solved, I tried a number of motherboard fixes: checking BIOS settings, checking plugs, trying different SATA ports, taking out the CMOS battery, restoring board to factory settings... nothing has worked. Board is in AHCI mode.

Any ideas or recommendations? I've managed to install windows again on my platter HDD but until I figure out how to get the SSD to show up in BIOS I'm sort of clueless. I would rather not give up on the drive yet though -- I'm a moron and hadn't created a backup in a while due to a move.

 

[johnbl]

I think a windows update might lock the drive, and having certain intel storage drivers will cause your partitions drive letters to be reassigned.



I would boot on a windows disk and run the diskpart.exe command
it would look something like this:
dispart.exe
diskpart> list disk
diskpart> select disk 0
diskpart> attrib disk
diskpart> attrib volume

basically you are looking for a drive or volume that is set to read only
then you would clear the readonly bit to fix it

you would select the volume or drive, then clear the readonly bit

something like:
select volume 4
attributes volume clear readonly

or maybe the same for the drive (sorry it has been a while since I looked at one of these problems)
select disk 0
attribuetes disk clear readonly

this would fix the lock problem:
you would still have to use diskpart to change the drive letters back.