Oh, for the love of... Crucial M4 "5,100 hrs." bug?

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi folks,

This morning, I found my computer displaying a message of "Choose boot media and restart".

After a restart, I saw that my Crucial m4 SSD is no longer seen by the system.

A quick Google search turned out that this SSD series has a bug that manifests itself after 5,100 hours of operation. It requires a firmware update.

I made a quick calculation, and yes... the SSD was bought in November, the machine was kept on 24 hours/day pretty much all the times, so it looks like this is it...

Now how the heck do I upgrade the firmware, if the SSD is not seen by the machine anymore?

 

[ikachu]

If you completely power off your machine and turn it back on again the drive should be detected for another hour.

 

[LoveMachine]

Using another computer, download the new firmware from Crucial's website and put it on a bootable USB stick. Follow the directions on the website, and on booting from the USB drive, the tool should see the drive.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Using another computer, download the new firmware from Crucial's website and put it on a bootable USB stick. Follow the directions on the website, and on booting from the USB drive, the tool should see the drive.

Thanks for the advice, folks! Need to try this tonight, wish me luck!

 

[AnitaPeterson]

OK, it worked!
Many people ask questions and don't post updates, but here's mine:

After powering off the machine (and turning off the power supply) for several hours, I was able to boot back into Windows.

Luckily, the firmware upgrade procedure was described in detail on the Crucial.com web site (a rare instance of efficiency!), so I downloaded the file and placed it on a specially-created USB boot disk on a spare flash key. The instructions even offered a suggestion for a free software package (Pendrive Linux) to create that bootable USB drive!

After restarting and booting from the USB key, the firmware was flashed without incident. And yes, once everything was up and running, I looked at the "Hours of operation" count: 5,200 !

All's well that ends well. I'm still amazed by Crucial's smooth handling of a potentially damaging situation. This should be the norm, not the exception!

*edit* here's the link to the firmware and instructions, in case anyone needs it: http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ (for making a USB boot disk)

 

[tweakboy]

Wow, Anita nice work to get it going again. Thanks for the informative post.

gl