HELP! Intel X-25M 160 GB not working!

[joanne firus]

I had it installed in my laptop.

A few hours ago I closed the lid on my laptop, but I noticed that it wasn't going into sleep mode (which it usually does, since I've set it up as such).

I opened the lid again, and found out that even though the laptop was running nothing was coming up on the screen.

I can't quite remember what I did after that, but I must've either held down the power button to force it to shut down and popped out the battery, or I went straight ahead and popped out the battery (after disconnecting the power supply).

Either way, I put the battery back on, and turned on the laptop.
And it kept telling me that it couldn't detect any harddrives!

I have since taken the SSD out of the laptop, and connected to my iMac using the USB-to-SATA adapter from my Seagate USB harddrive.
I've noticed that, without the SSD connected to the adapter, the lights on the adapter light up as normal; but once I connect the SSD to it, the light goes off.
Needless to say, the iMac isn't detecting the SSD either (even though it has absolutely NO trouble detecting any drives formatted to SATA/NTFS, as I've installed the Paragon NTFS drivers on it).

Did I just turn my SSD into a useless doorstop?

 

[Coup27]

Connect it back into your laptop and boot into BIOS. Is the disk listed and does it show a capacity? Intel have had a power related flaw which leaves the disk showing as 8MB.

If this has happened you need to secure erase the disk using either the Intel SSD toolbox with the drive connected to another machine or a live Linux distro. After you've secure erased it it will come back to life.

If the disk isn't listed in BIOS at all it's likely FUBAR.

 

[joanne firus]

Connect it back into your laptop and boot into BIOS. Is the disk listed and does it show a capacity? Intel have had a power related flaw which leaves the disk showing as 8MB.

If this has happened you need to secure erase the disk using either the Intel SSD toolbox with the drive connected to another machine or a live Linux distro. After you've secure erased it it will come back to life.

If the disk isn't listed in BIOS at all it's likely FUBAR.

Either way, I assume that any data in the drive would no longer be accessible?

I'll see if I find the USB with PartedMagic in it...

 

[razel]

+1 to Coup. What we're trying to do is work on it direct and simply. 1st diagnosis is to connect it direct via SATA and see if you BIOS even sees it. If not, call up a buddy and connect it to their PC to see if it's BIOS sees it via SATA. That isolates whether it's the drive or your PC.

If both don't see it, you'll need to connect it via SATA off another PC that has Intel's SSD Toolbox running. You maybe able to recover the drive, but not your data.

 

[Emulex]

yeah they just die sometimes. oddly i've have 3 x25-m's die without any smart warning just hung on shutdown and was kaput afterwards.

 

[fuzzymath10]

I had a G1 drive quasi-fail after restoring an image to it. It was stuck in some endless activity loop. It was detectable so I secure erased it, and it has been working fine since, running almost 24/7 for about a year.

 

[joanne firus]

+1 to Coup. What we're trying to do is work on it direct and simply. 1st diagnosis is to connect it direct via SATA and see if you BIOS even sees it. If not, call up a buddy and connect it to their PC to see if it's BIOS sees it via SATA. That isolates whether it's the drive or your PC.

If both don't see it, you'll need to connect it via SATA off another PC that has Intel's SSD Toolbox running. You maybe able to recover the drive, but not your data.

Well, it sure as hell isn't the laptop's problem, as I had just connected the original SATA drive that came with it back into it, and I'm working from it right now.

It's kinda funny how my 10-15 year-old IDE drives, and my 5-8 year-old SATA drives still work just fine (well, almost fine, as one of the IDE drives has a corrupt partitions); whereas my 5-month old SSD just died.

And these Intel SSDs are supposedly some of the most reliable SSDs out there!

Granted, I bought the SSD used; but I secured erased it, and set it up properly before doing anything to it. Heck, I remember the Intel SSD toolbox telling me that the drive still had around 98% of life left about two weeks ago (and, if anything, the drive has experienced much less load in the past weeks than it did in the past few months).

I'll see if I can find another PC to test it out; but if I can't recover the data at all then I doubt I'd even bother.

 

[Coup27]

I'll see if I can find another PC to test it out; but if I can't recover the data at all then I doubt I'd even bother.

You should be able to put it back into your laptop and check BIOS to see if it shows up. If it doesn't show up then you may be able to revive it with a secure erase. If that doesn't work then it's FUBAR. Unfortunately either way though I'm pretty confident your data is toast.

There are NAND recovery specialists but I hope you have deep pockets.