Corsair SSD appears completely blank and does not retain written data

Posted by ebanders on Super User See other posts from Super User or by ebanders
Published on 2011-01-17T14:36:14Z Indexed on 2011/01/17 14:55 UTC
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hard-drive

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Troubleshooting

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ssd

I have a 180GB Corsair SSD (model# CSSD-F180GB2-BRKT) as the primary drive in a Windows laptop. Recently the machine became unbootable after installing Windows updates. Windows installed updates before the machine shut down and the next time the machine boot up it complained about not being able to find a bootable device. After finding fixmbr unsuccessful at making the machine unbootable, I investigated a little within knoppix.

Fdisk revealed an empty partition table. A scan by Testdisk came up empty. And finally 'head -c 1024 | hd' reveals all zeros.

Creating a primary partition spanning the whole disk completes successfully, but after a reboot the disk appears empty again. dmesg reveals no read or write errors.

smartctl indicates that the drive is healthy- although the SMART attribute values do not appear to be read properly. "Data Page | WARNING: PREVIOUS ATTRIBUTE HAS TWO" and "Threshold Page | INCONSISTENT IDENTITIES IN THE DATA" messages appear within the table of values.

I don't have much experience with SSDs. Is this drive dead or something? Can anyone recommend any diagnostic tools that may be suited for diagnosing SSDs?

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