SSD Meltdown Nightmare

[pokerisfun]

Hi Everyone,

I bought a very expensive rig from Scan at the very end of 2009. Here is the link to the thread where I chose the spec

http://forums.hexus.net/scan-3xs-sys...nted-here.html.

Despite a few minorish niggles (The rig was not configured as I requested on arrival and the overclock bios settings were wrong on arrival) I have been reasonably happy with this purchase. However some bad stuff has happened recently with the SSDs.

I had noticed over the past few months a lot of niggling problems with stuff on the SSDs. Some installations and data would frequently become corrupted. Chkdsk would run itself on restart frequently. I had noticed in the past three months one of the SSDs had ERROR OCCURED in red writing next to it on one of the screens that flashes by before windows loads (the other SSD is in green writing and listed as fine). My SSDs are in RAID as one disk as far as windows is concerned and this error did not stop it booting and running fun. Sadly the other week these problems became more frequent and eventually the computer would not boot after a restart. Windows repair would try and run but it would just reboot everytime. I ran windows repair off the WIN 7 install DVD after booting from that and eventually it settled on restoring from a backup in 2010 after reformatting the ssds. This installation failed to boot as well but after running windows repair it started to work and it was fine. I phoned SCAN and they suggested first of all upgrading the SSD firmware and second of all checking to see if it is a cabling error.

Yesterday it failed again with the same inability to reboot. Reformatting and restoring from an old image no longer works. I tried upgrading the firmware on the SSDs. I succeeded with one of them which is now reported as having firmware 2.0 by the upgrade tool but although it says I successfully upgraded the other one it still shows as firmware 1.1 so I suspect something is wrong there. I opened it up and checked all the cables, they all seem securely connected at least. I am unable to try swapping the cables around between the SSDs as to be honest I am not even sure which drives ARE the SSDs on my machine. They are hidden behind water cooling pipes and I did not want to unscrew those.

Sadly my very expensive system is now at the minute useless. I am pretty gutted at this of course and wishing I had never invested in SSDs. I did purchase an extra 2 years extended warranty on top of the 1 year standard waarranty when I bought the system which means I am still covered by this. What should my next step be?

PokerIsFun

[pokerisfun]

I have managed to get back into windows again and crystaldiskinfo is reporting one of the drives at 26% health and firmware 2.0 (the one that green lights at startup)

the other drive is as I suspected showing firmware 1.1 still (despite the upgrade tool reporting success) and is only at 10% health with a "caution" next to drive life....what to do?

[pokerisfun]

On further investigation around the net it seems these drives are infamous for their high failure rates early in life. Sigh.

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi

I have emailed you the contact details for Burnetts as they deal with extended warranty claims

Regards

Ben

[pokerisfun]

Hi Ben,

The repair guy arrived today and swiftly changed out my SSD drives for new ones. He then broke the raid thing I had on the two old SSD drives from before so windows saw the new drives as two seperate entities. The image backup did not work so he did a fresh reinstall of windows. Everything seemed to be perfect and I signed off on the repair and he left. I then sat for the next few hours updating windows and reinstalling stuff like office etc again. Everything seemed fine and the computer went through several restarts doing this of course. I used the first SSD disk just for windows and norton and the other now seperate SSD for program installations. On one reboot I reloaded the standard bios settings (as the amount of memory shown on boot was incorrect and this usually cures it). Now my machine refuses to boot from the drive. I do not think it is a problem with the drive or the installation it is just now the bios refuses to see the drives correctly. They are all listed if I ctrl-i when the drive screen comes up but absolutely nothing I can do will get it to boot. I just always get a insert boot device type message. Booting from the win 7 DVD reveals an "unknown system on unknown disk". Absolutely no settings I can see on the bios can make it boot from my new SSDs. Help please this is just so insanely frustrating.

[Jasp]

Just taking a guess here but could be the drive needs setting to ACHI in the bios, sounds like its defaulted to IDE mode which would cause a non boot, setting it back to ACHI or RAID depending which he used should allow it to boot again, should be under the sata settings in the bios.

[pokerisfun]

Just taking a guess here but could be the drive needs setting to ACHI in the bios, sounds like its defaulted to IDE mode which would cause a non boot, setting it back to ACHI or RAID depending which he used should allow it to boot again, should be under the sata settings in the bios.

Jasp,

Thanks for the reply. I have tried all three settings already, none work. Any other ideas?

[Jasp]

Hmmzz, have you checked the drives boot order in the bios? it might be trying to load from the wrong SSD if you reset the settings.

[pokerisfun]

Yeah i have been through the boot order millions of times trying everything. Tellingly there is only one SSD listed in that selection and nothing I select provides the ability to boot. Both in the bios and when you press F8 on bootup. The screen that flashes past before windows loads lists all 5 drives correctly and in green tho.

[Bambooz]

This isn't a driver or settings issue. Playing with the settings is nothing but a waste of time in this case. The SSD is as good as dead if crystaldiskinfo reports the health being that low.
The data corruption seems to confirm this. Basically the NAND flash chips are worn to the point where they can't reliably store data anymore. Updating the firmware much earlier would have probably saved them if the newer firmware addressed high wear, but updating them now when they're almost dead is "a bit" too late.

As for one drive still reporting Firmware 1.1 ... if you have 2 identical SSDs, you might have flashed firmware 2.0 onto the first drive twice instead of updating the 2nd one.

[pokerisfun]

bambooz thanks for the reply but if you read up youll see that i have new SSDs (the old ones were indeed as good as dead) and this is a different issue

[Bambooz]

Whoops.. yeah I missed that
Either AHCI setting messed up (in legacy/IDE mode) or the boot order is wrong (It's trying to boot from the 2nd SSD (or any other drive), which doesn't have a OS on it)

[Jonj1611]

I would have to say the problem lays within the bios somewhere, I would go through every setting and if possible try and get Scan to send you the bios settings they used.

[pokerisfun]

Whoops.. yeah I missed that
Either AHCI setting messed up (in legacy/IDE mode) or the boot order is wrong (It's trying to boot from the 2nd SSD (or any other drive), which doesn't have a OS on it)

I would have to say the problem lays within the bios somewhere, I would go through every setting and if possible try and get Scan to send you the bios settings they used

I have been through every possible boot order setting. There is only one SSD listed in the bios boot order menu (there are two there in reality though) I cannot get it to boot no matter what.

I agree that is very likely a problem with the bios settings. Unfortuantely as I have already said today when I got my SSDs changedtoday there was a big change where I went for (on scans advice) simply having the SSDs as two seperate drives. Before on the old version that failed I had two SSDs that were raided into one disk as far as windows was concerned. When the engineer left everything was working fine and booting ok, and I restarted several times. Now I reloaded the bios settings I cannot get it to boot at all despite having tried everything with all the settings you guys mention.

I already am trying scans settings, but they are not working. I am guessing it is because they are for a system with the two ssds acting as one drive but this is just a guess and for the life of me I have tried every setting possible and nothing works

[Bambooz]

If there's only one SSD showing up, either there's something wrong with the BIOS settings (duh), or the actual boot SSD has now disappeared for some strange reason (cabling, died, ..), although I kinda doubt it's the latter.

Sucks there's no such thing as "remote access to the BIOS" (like Teamviewer, VNC, RDP etc on windows)..
Without sitting in front of the BIOS, seeing what it's set to and what options the particular board has, it's very hard to suggest anything without just guessing randomly (most common problems) :/

Do you know which of the physical SSDs is the boot and which is the secondary drive? If so, you could try disconnecting the SATA cable from the secondary one to see if the boot SSD is recognized at all, which seems to be the problem right now..

[MaddAussie]

I would have thought putting the old bios back on may have enabled the RAID, turn it off and I think it should boot again