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
Read the original article Hit count: 190

Filed under:

hard-drive

|

Troubleshooting

|

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?

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about hard-drive

Move smaller hard drive to partition on a larger hard drive

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu. I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about… >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More
Using an ATA-100 Hard Drive with a Thermaltake BlacX External Hard Drive Dock

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Is it possible for a Thermaltake BlacX HDD Dock to connect to and recognize an ATA-100 Hard Drive? I know that the specifications for the BlacX say that it only supports SATA & SATAII, but I was hoping for one of three things: 1) for it to still work even though it isn't supported 2) for there… >>> More
backup hard drive image on external hard drive for Windows 7

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hello, I am looking for a backup tool for Windows 7, that will allow me to backup my laptop’s hard drive on an external hard drive as an exact image. In a case of a problem with the main hard drive, I would like just to swap the drives and to continue to work using the backup hard drive. Thanks >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More

Related posts about Troubleshooting

hardware troubleshooting,

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting,hardware troubleshooting, >>> More
Troubleshooting PC

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
After playing PC games after a few hours I decided to take a break. When I opened up My Computer in Windows 7 I noticed I one of my drives had disappeared. Thinking it was just a glitch, I tried to restart. Upon restart, the BIOS took forever to get through (I didn't notice my disappeared hard drive… >>> More
Troubleshooting PC

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
After playing PC games after a few hours I decided to take a break. When I opened up My Computer in Windows 7 I noticed I one of my drives had disappeared. Thinking it was just a glitch, I tried to restart. Upon restart, the BIOS took forever to get through (I didn't notice my disappeared hard drive… >>> More
Troubleshooting Application Timeouts in SQL Server

as seen on SQL Team - Search for 'SQL Team'
I recently received the following email from a blog reader: "We are having an OLTP database instance, using SQL Server 2005 with little to moderate traffic (10-20 requests/min). There are also bulk imports that occur at regular intervals in this DB and the import duration ranges between 10secs to… >>> More
SQLAuthority Book Review Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting by Christian Bolton, Justin Langford, Brent Ozar, James Rowland-Jones, Steven WortLink to Amazon (Worldwide)Link to Flipkart (India)Brief Review: Having a book on internal and associating that with real life is almost an impossible task. The… >>> More