SSD boot disk died on me

roosterman71

Well techie guru people,

Last night, my PC was up and humming away grand, but for some reason it died while I was having my dinner, and telling me when I came back to reboot and select the right boot device. I did the reboot, and noticed in the BIOS that my SSD (running Win7 Ultimate) wasn't the primary boot device, so I changed that and let her off. No luck and she hung, then rebooted with the original error.

So I tried again. This time I noticed a green light on the SSD and it stayed green until it tried to start Windows, at which point it changed to red/orange.

Is my SSD dead? Any ideas?

It has Windows on it, but also some files I'd need to get at. I've 2 other old school disks in the PC with other stuff on it and I assume they are the finest still.

Any suggestions on how to recover/fix the SSD?

M/B: ASRock P67 Pro3 (B3), Sockel 1155, ATX
RAM: 8GB-Kit Corsair DDR3 PC1600 C9 Classic
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 650W
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Box, LGA1155
SSD: OCZ SSD Vertex 2 120GB 8,9cm (3,5")
GPU: Sapphire HD6950 1G GDDR5 PCI-E DL-DVI-I+SL-DVI-D / HDMI / DUAL MINI DP
HDD: WD AV-GP 1TB, 64MB Cache, SATA II (WD10EURS)

Are Am Eye

Do you have linux or hiren cd or usb stick to diagnose/ move files? You can download off another machine.
Also open box and have a look at ssd. Are cables seated right

roosterman71

Are Am Eye wrote: »

Do you have linux or hiren cd or usb stick to diagnose/ move files? You can download off another machine.
Also open box and have a look at ssd. Are cables seated right

I've built the Hiren stuff onto a USB this morning. I'll see what I can do with that later.
I have reseated the SSD too and checked the cables. All are fine as far as I can tell

I added my system specs to the OP there too

Are Am Eye

Try a different data cable with it. You can borrow one from another drive temporarily just to diagnose problem.

roosterman71

Are Am Eye wrote: »

Try a different data cable with it. You can borrow one from another drive temporarily just to diagnose problem.

I'll give that a go tomorrow alright. I managed to boot from USB (setup Hirens) and copied what I need off the disk.

Seems to stay on for that business, but just won't let Windows kick in on boot (little green light goes red - it's been green the last few hours as I copied stuff off it). Any idea whats going on there? Drive is still alive, but just banjaxed at boot up?

smuggler.ie

roosterman71 wrote: »

.... I managed to boot from USB (setup Hirens) and copied what I need off the disk.

Since you got your data out might try this and see if it helps....
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/
....or clean install

roosterman71

smuggler.ie wrote: »

Since you got your data out might try this and see if it helps....
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/
....or clean install

From reading that, it's not the MBR that's the issue as windows starts to load, then the SSD fires on it's little red light of doom and it hangs. Not sure where to go from here to be honest. Anytime I seem to scan, or do any diagnostics on the SSD, my red friend appears. Though it didn't do it when copying the files last night which was nice.

smuggler.ie

roosterman71 wrote: »

From reading that, it's not the MBR that's the issue as windows starts to load, then the SSD fires on it's little red light of doom and it hangs. Not sure where to go from here to be honest. Anytime I seem to scan, or do any diagnostics on the SSD, my red friend appears. Though it didn't do it when copying the files last night which was nice.

OK... Can you confirm SSD is recognized as functioning disk on another system. You booted from USB and were able to gather your data after all.
Hard Disk Sentinel or similar tools will tell you status of your drive. Connect drive to another PC, if SSD still healthy enough - could be OS problem - try repair it or clean install.
Otherwise .... sorry for your loss .... and congratulations with your brand new disk(T&C apply)!!!!

T&C: new SSD might/will cost some €€€

roosterman71

I'll rip it out now shortly and connect it up via USB to something tomorrow. We'll see what happens then I suppose.

Kinda thinking now to build from scratch again. Have it nearly 7 years so maybe an upgrade is due!

smuggler.ie

Sorry for my ignorance but "3.5 SSD" .... in 120GB capacity....
I come across this article

The last seen 3.5″ SSD in the market was in 2007 when a company called Mtron released its unsuccessful, short-living MSD-S series SSD. A year later, SSD manufacturers like Intel, confined the focus and efforts only into developing SSDs in 2.5″ form factor and that’s for a logical reason that a 2.5″ form factor can be deployed in both laptop and desktop computers whereas the 3.5″ form factor is exclusively for desktops.

Make yourself nice Christmas gift (or give someone good idea )

OCZ SSDs based on Sandforce controllers were notoriously unreliable so it's possible that it could have died. 3.5" versions of the Vertex 2 do exist alright, I installed one in a PC in work at one stage, maybe 7 or 8 years ago.