Need Hard Drive Help

medicalhumor

medicalhumor

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Oct 17, 2007
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Ok, so after reading all the threads awhile ago about how great SSD drives were, I bought one for my laptop. I got a Crucial SSD 256gb drive and migrated my old 5400 rpm drive to it.

It was awesome. My laptop would boot in under 30 seconds, photoshop would pop open in seconds. I fell in love with it.
After about 4-5 months of using it, Windows 7 decided to update itself automatically and restart itself. Grrrr, I hate Windows updates. After it shut down, it never came back up. It would freeze on the splash screen and nothing else. I couldn't even get into bios. Nothing.

So I removed the ssd drive and stuck my old mechanical disk back in and bam, booted up (albeit painfully slow) and worked without issue.
so I thought the ssd drive just died. but I plugged it in to a usb enclosure and connected it to my desktop and I was able to access the drive. Thankfully, I was able to copy all of my data, but I'm puzzled as to what happened.

Any suggestions on what's going on? Is this thing worthless now? Anyone else experience anything like this? I want to get another ssd drive because the speed is awesome, but if it's going to crash again after 5 months, I don't want to throw away my money.

On a side note, I also saw a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-7200RPM-Hybrid-ST750LX003/dp/B00691WMJG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344052289&sr=8-2&keywords=momentus+hybrid"]Seagate Momentus hybrid drive[/ame], that ran the OS and often used files on ssd section and 750gb of magnetic disk. This looks like a decent alternative.
 


Sounds like a file needed for bootup is corrupt.

You need to take the SSD drive and make it a secondary drive, while booting with your old one. You should be able to run a disk check (chkdsk) on the SSD from within windows

I'd do it in safe mode if possible. if windows 7 is like previous versions regarding safe mode, you can tap the F8 key right before the windows splash screen and get the menu for safe mode.
 
Corrupt boot partition you will most likely need to reparation / reformat the drive.

I think the SSD drives are fantastic but their failure rate is high so let this be a very cheap lesson to get backup drives or at least backup to a cloud like carbonite or the like
 
nickCR said:
Corrupt boot partition you will most likely need to reparation / reformat the drive.

I think the SSD drives are fantastic but their failure rate is high so let this be a very cheap lesson to get backup drives or at least backup to a cloud like carbonite or the like
Click to expand...

Yeah, fortunately I have good back up, so that wasnt an issue. I just really miss the speed of the ssd. My old 5400rpm drive is painfully slow, despite having an i5 quad core processor and 8gb ram.

Is this common for these solid state drives to corrupt like this?

I'm really leaning towards one of the new MacBook pro's with retina display ( though they also have ssd as well)
 
Deliguy said:
windows update probably set a restore point before updating. You should be able to restore back.
Click to expand...

Thing is, it won't boot, doesn't make it past the slash screen.
Is it possible to plug it in and restore it as a secondary drive?
 
medicalhumor said:
Yeah, fortunately I have good back up, so that wasnt an issue. I just really miss the speed of the ssd. My old 5400rpm drive is painfully slow, despite having an i5 quad core processor and 8gb ram.

Is this common for these solid state drives to corrupt like this?

I'm really leaning towards one of the new MacBook pro's with retina display ( though they also have ssd as well)
Click to expand...

SSD's are somewhat known to have problems at least the older ones, it seems the newer ones have much better stability. Personally I have a OCZ Vertex 2 and (knock on wood) it's been great.

I would do the following, use a 120GB SSD and have all your files stored somewhere else. Personally I would get a QNAP 419 (NAS) or the like, then have 4x 1 or 2 GB drives setup in pairs (2 drives in RAID1 / Mirrored). Then you have pair 1 backup to pair 2. That is if you want the backup local. If you don't mind it being on the net then use a cloud backup service. This method is pretty damn secure, you could however be even more secure by having 2 separate units all together.

medicalhumor said:
Thing is, it won't boot, doesn't make it past the slash screen. Is it possible to plug it in and restore it as a secondary drive?
Click to expand...

You can follow through this thread. There are some repair suggestions. If you have all the data though why even bother running those repairs. Just do the erase so that you wipe the drive completely, including partitions. This will put it back to practically factory and is suggested for SSD's.

Solved System won't boot from SSD, please help. - Windows 7 Forums

Also on that forum you can find some guides for optimizing your system for an SSD. This is extremely important as it reduces, reads and writes that are no longer necessary (such as indexing, etc)
 
I found that an ubuntu live install gets my ass out of cracks regularly, to go in and fix things manually.
 
been working on it today and finally had luck with Deliguy's advice. At first I ran a disk check, but no luck with that. Then I plugged it into one of my laptops usb ports and under properties, there's tab for recovery and I had a recovery set point right before it crashed. Once it finished, I plugged it in as my main drive and worked like a charm.

I use my laptop in too many places to rely on a local backup. Between home and two offices, it makes more sense for cloud based backup. I use Egnyte instead of dropbox for my important stuff because it's more secure and HIPAA compliant, which we need for our medical documents.
 
^glad it worked. Sorry I was out and didn't respond earlier.
I suggest Before you do too much more, use Disk Cleanup to remove the corrupt window update installation files from your computer and restart the update.
Also, Carbonite is a good cloud based backup system.
 
Eli hasn't been this helpful since his last bluehatseo post in 2006.








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If it means anything to you, I've been running my office PC (this one) for a couple years now on SSD without issue. I think you would have run into this issue with a standard drive because it was just a corrupted file.

Next time this happens (if it does at all), just boot into safe mode and do a system restore while the SSD is still primary. That was really all you needed to do.
 
ScottDaMan said:
If it means anything to you, I've been running my office PC (this one) for a couple years now on SSD without issue. I think you would have run into this issue with a standard drive because it was just a corrupted file.

Next time this happens (if it does at all), just boot into safe mode and do a system restore while the SSD is still primary. That was really all you needed to do.
Click to expand...

Problem was he didn't even get to boot. Probably a corrupted boot file or something. Hardware has funny ways of acting up.

@MedicalHumor: Glad you got it sorted out :), definitely take a look at the system optimizing for SSD's. It's helped a lot on my end.

@DeliGuy: +rep for a good solution.
 
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