Tencent

Honorable
Feb 17, 2014
4
0
10,510
My HP Envy 4 laptop was running Windows 10 on a 240GB Kingston SSD. The disk had only two partitions and everything was working satisfactorily for about 4 years until recently, despite the strange high pitch noises coming from the disk while in operation. Last week when it was waking up from hibernate (due to low battery) a black screen appeared. Since it didn’t go away (for few seconds) and I was in a rush to complete my work, I force turned it off (press & held power button).

Upon booting up, it went into "repairing disk errors, this may take over an hour to complete” screen. Having lost my patience, I force turned it off again after a couple of minutes. This time it went into “diagnosing your PC” screen and then into “automatic repair couldn’t repair your PC” but I managed to get back “repairing disk errors…..one hour” by selecting“startup repair” in advanced options. This time, I decided to let it finish, but it never finished and neither did it show any progress even after 7-8 hours.

After that, I tried several methods to get it back working – including boot repair through recovery mode CMD and connecting the SSD to another computer via a USB HDD enclosure. CMD indicated the drive C was “access denied” and its file system was “RAW”. When attempted to access it on a Linux system, C drive couldn’t be mounted, but indicated as NTFS drive.

After all, I gave up the idea of ever booting on this disk again and attempted to recover my precious data on it. No matter what I tried, they all failed. However, the other partition on this disk (which was drive D) remains intact so whatever happened has only affected drive C .

Have any of you experienced something like this with an SSD? Anybody has any idea what might have happened to this SSD? And will there be any chances that I can recover my data on it? Your kind help and ideas are highly appreciated.
 
Last edited:

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Have any of you experienced something like this with an SSD? Anybody has any idea what might have happened to this SSD? And will there be any chances that I can recover my data on it? Your kind help and ideas are highly appreciated.

There is a pretty good chance that the SSD was corrupted by the shutdown during a write. Recovery of data will be difficult at best but afterwards a secure erase and fresh install of W10 should get it working again.

Since you cannot mount it in Linux many of the usual tools are out as they are Linux based. I would try attaching it to a W10 computer and see if EaseUS works on it.
 

Tencent

Honorable
Feb 17, 2014
4
0
10,510
Thanks for your response. Yeah, I too think it's got currupted somehow, I never expected such thing with a solid state storage device though. I already installed a new SSD and got my computer working back again becauses my primary interest is to recover my data on that old SSD.
Currently that disk cannot be connected to a Windows PC as it causes the Windows Explorer to freeze. So I tried some recovery tools on Linux. Tried "smartmont tools" on Terminal and also tried "R-studio" GUI app. Neither of them worked for me. However, as I mentioned before, only C drive has gone bad like this. I'm still hoping for some method to recover my data on it.