I’m sure a lot of you have faced this: you’re using an SSD, you turn it off one day, and the other day that crap just won’t boot. The damn thing won’t even be recognized by your BIOS/UEFI no matter what you do. You might be using sleep or hibernation, and this might be one of the causes. I really don’t know, but here’s what I did in order to bring my brand new, but dead SSD back to life.
But first, some more background stories. I had an OCZ Vertex 2 in my new comp, which was an ECS A75F-M2 powered by an AMD A6-3500 APU. It ran for like 1 year in my previous config just fine. Then I bought this new one and it ran for another 6 months just fine. Then one day I turned my comp on and then came the symptoms explained above. Ok, OCZ has horrible return rates, especially compared to other vendors, so it “just died”, I guessed. I battled with my retailer for like 3 months to finally get it replaced.
I was so happy with my replacement Crucial m4… for a whole 2 days. Then it started to do the same thing. Then I was like, “no shit, it can’t be the SSD, AGAIN”. Then I googled a bit and found a Crucial knowledge base article which explains a procedure which may or may not restore your SSD from the brick state.
I won’t be copy-pasting, just read it and do it, there are only complaints about it not working, but for me it did work. And I sure as hell will leave hibernation and sleep disabled …
Edit: since the link is now broken, I dug out the info:
- Once you have the drive connected and sitting idle, simply power on the computer and wait for 20 minutes. We recommend that you don’t use the computer during this process.
- Power the computer down and disconnect the drive from the power connector for 30 seconds.
- Reconnect the drive, and repeat steps 1 and 2 one more time.
- Reconnect the drive normally, and boot the computer to your operating system.
That should do it. Cheers!