SSD Mishap

[ScottAD]

I built this system about 7 months ago. Specs are;

Mobo: ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 Gen 3
CPU: I5 2500k
Ram: 16 GB Corsair Low profile Dominator
GPU: Radeon 6870
SSD: Crucial M4 60GB
HDD: Hitachi 1TB
PSU: Seasonic 750w

Everything has been working fine since until I tried to install the AIO printer given to me for Christmas. While moving the tower to plug in the usb cable I unfortunately pulled the power cord from the PSU.

Now when I power up I can get past POST and Windows begins to load then it BSODs and loops back through post.

I've checked all connections, moved the sata cable to port 1 instead of port 0, rebuilt MBT and CBD, tries booting with just the SSD plugged in.

So I figured I would try just reinstalling Windows. BIOS sees the drive but install wants drivers. I am installing in AHCI mode. The CD that came with the Mobo was ruined awhile back and even though I go to ASRock and download the drivers on a usb stick the Windows install does not see the drivers. I've formatted the stick as NTFS and FAT 32.

I'm stuck and not sure where to go from here.

Any insight?

 

[Coup27]

Are you sure your BIOS is in AHCI and not RAID?

I can only suggest secure erasing the SSD using parted magic or a live Linux distro and re-attempting installation.

 

[ScottAD]

Yes I saved it went back and checked twice before attempting reinstall. I will have to try that.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Not sure what is going on here specifically, but my gut tells me from the description that it's unlikely the SSD is bad at a low level.

Does Micron provide any sort of diagnostic utilities you could try?

 

[ScottAD]

It does and the SSD was healthy as of month and a half ago. It was bought brand new but who knows could be bad

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Well can you run it again?

 

[tracerbullet]

BIOS sees the drive but install wants drivers.

This doesn't make sense to me. I've never seen a BIOS ask for drivers.

What exactly happens when you boot? When does it stall and what does it say?

 

[ScottAD]

Perhaps that statement was misleading. Windows install is asking for drivers not BIOS

 

[ScottAD]

Well can you run it again?

I will need to move it to another pc but yes can do

 

[SpeedTester]

I built this system about 7 months ago. Specs are;

Mobo: ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 Gen 3
CPU: I5 2500k
Ram: 16 GB Corsair Low profile Dominator
GPU: Radeon 6870
SSD: Crucial M4 60GB
HDD: Hitachi 1TB
PSU: Seasonic 750w

Everything has been working fine since until I tried to install the AIO printer given to me for Christmas. While moving the tower to plug in the usb cable I unfortunately pulled the power cord from the PSU.

Now when I power up I can get past POST and Windows begins to load then it BSODs and loops back through post.

I've checked all connections, moved the sata cable to port 1 instead of port 0, rebuilt MBT and CBD, tries booting with just the SSD plugged in.

So I figured I would try just reinstalling Windows. BIOS sees the drive but install wants drivers. I am installing in AHCI mode. The CD that came with the Mobo was ruined awhile back and even though I go to ASRock and download the drivers on a usb stick the Windows install does not see the drivers. I've formatted the stick as NTFS and FAT 32.

I'm stuck and not sure where to go from here.

Any insight?

Hey there, sounds like you have the crucial 5200 hour firmware bug. Based on your 7 months of use if you leave your PC on you would be right there as far as time goes. Update your firmware to the latest revision if you haven't already and let us know if that works out.
http://www.storagereview.com/crucial_m4_0309_firmware_update_for_5200_hour_bug_released

 

[ScottAD]

Well this is what I am doing right now, I put Parted Magic on a drive and have erased the disk. I had 5600 or so hours on the drive so don't think it was that but I am going to update to the latest anyway (I was 2 versions back), and update the Bios (2 versions back too), and go from there.

I have done a secure write so the drive should be blank now.

 

[ScottAD]

So its fixed!

Secure erasing the drive and loading drivers from a cd worked

 

[SpeedTester]

So its fixed!

Secure erasing the drive and loading drivers from a cd worked

Did you update the drives firmware also?

 

[ScottAD]

Yes but it was on a release that had already corrected the hour issue

 

[tweakboy]

I think hes gone,, hes was soo excited it worked...

 

[Coup27]

I'm glad it's now fixed but I am still puzzled as to why you need drivers when installing Windows 7 in AHCI mode. What drivers are you installing? The Intel RST F6 drivers or some others?

 

[ScottAD]

I believe it was labeled Etron usb 3.0 host controller which makes no sense.

 

[groberts101]

I believe it was labeled Etron usb 3.0 host controller which makes no sense.

it makes perfect sense when you consider that Windows doesn't have USB 3.0 drivers built in by default. If you would have plugged the USB stick into the USB 2.0 ports.. you'd have been fine with default OS install without needing 3rd party 3.0 drivers.

As for the issue that you saw there.. I've yanked the plug out just to see what data gets lost more than a few time.. on raid arrays as well.. and never corrupted the SSD/s to that extent.. but.. anything can happen on ocassion and that's where backup images or uaxilliary boot drives come into play.

Had you used that type of protocol.. you'd likely been able to recover any data you needed off the main boot drive in such a situation. MBR.. or SSD gets corrupted?.. reboot.. change boot order.. sucessfully boot to other drive.. recover data. Or... SE with parted magic(or whatever has the SE command available)..insert recovery disk.. reimage the main drive.

Not to rub salt.. just friendly advice for future reference, is all.

 

[ScottAD]

I did use parted Magic to access the drive. Yes the front ports are usb 3.0 but I don't understand how a usb driver would allow the install to see a SSD and HDD connected to a sata port. It could not even see the HDD when in IDE.

I lost no data aside from the OS as the HDD holds all important files.

Mind you I'm not trying to disagree just don't see how those correlated.
I used a cd burned with the files and the only files I asked it to look for was the Etron drivers in its own sub folder.