Question Can I repair a damaged partition? suspected MFT failure.

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
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I have a Samsung SSD 850 Evo which suddenly won't boot, it claims windows can't be found and loading it onto another computer keeps telling me the drive needs to be formatted. I'm not an expert but I'm thinking it may be an MFT failure, is there any way to recover the drive contents or repair the MFT?
 
Jul 27, 2020
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How old is the SSD? What is your typical workload? Running any databases or other write-intensive workloads? Was the PC shutdown uncleanly (hard power off)?
 

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
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The drive is from 2015, workload on that machine is light these days, e-mail/internet browsing etc but it used to be a 3d render machine util 2019. It wouldn't power down from the start button yesterday (just unresponsice after clicking 'switch off') and I ran a disk repair and sys file check both of which claimed to have found and fixed errors, had to do a hard power off a couple of times. Last thing at night yetsreday it was hanging endlessly when it was powering down so I switched off at the power again.

Worst case scenario if it can't be repaired is there are a few key files I need to recover (outlook express .pst file, firefox bookmarks, google earth .kmz file) so if I can get a good file recovery software I'll live with that but preferably I'd like to just repair the damage if possible.
 
Jul 27, 2020
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I had a Sandforce drive once that became inaccessible. Nothing fixed it. One day, I just connected it to my PC as a secondary drive and went about my work. Few hours later, the drive came online. Seems there was some internal corruption and the firmware was able to fix the damage given enough time (maybe they used a really slow CPU for the flash controller or just a complete integrity check like a detailed surface scan needed to be completed by the firmware). So that's one thing you could do. Just connect it to a PC as a secondary drive and let it run for a few hours or overnight. It might recover itself.

You could also try to see what Samsung Magician says about the drive. The extended SMART test might repair it.
 
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boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
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tried some of the above suggestions but none worked, I was able to recover some data I needed and tried to format and reinstall windows but the disk was now write protected. I managed to disable that and delete partitions and re-format but now windows won't install on it saying it couldn't create a partition or locate an existing one but my other computer can see and access the disk OK when plugged in vis a usb adapter. Might just write it off and get a new one, bit pissed off as the original HDD from 2009 is still going strong, I though a newer SSD would outlast it to be honest.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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Might just write it off and get a new one, bit pissed off as the original HDD from 2009 is still going strong, I though a newer SSD would outlast it to be honest.

There are lots of SSD-related failures in the laptop market. They are arguably more reliable than HDDs but electronics components often fail in a few years.

SSDs tend to fail catastrophically versus HDDs which often can become really really slow but can be recognized. In a way they are trading mechanical complexity for electronic complexity.
 

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
353
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Thanks for all the input guys, just one final question, I tried to use an old disk image to load onto the new SSD but windows wouldn't even see the external drive so I had to just install everything manually. I had the idea of cloning the new drive onto the old SSD which after deleting partitions, re-formatting and scanning seems to be working OK now, that way if I have a future emergency I should be able to plug this thing in and fire up straight away ( if it works....) but I have 2 desktops I'd like to backup. So the question is can I partition that single SSD and clone both computers into it and still have two bootable drives (on the one SSD) I can fall back on in an emergency?
 
Jul 27, 2020
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So the question is can I partition that single SSD and clone both computers into it and still have two bootable drives (on the one SSD) I can fall back on in an emergency?
It might be possible to have two boot partitions on one drive but you would need to mess around with bootmgr commands. Better to just save the old SSD's image file to some external drive and clone to a spare drive if the need arises in future.
 

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
353
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Yeah the BIOS can only see the physical drive so I thought it might be a problem directing it to a specific partition, I thought I could clone both then in an emercency delete the partition I don't need and it would boot to the other but it's six of one I suppose. Cheers.