Possibly Corrupted MSATA SSD

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jamesstam

Oct 19, 2018
2
0
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Good evening all,

I am after some assistance, but please forgive me with my technical terms as I've been out of the "loop" with laptops for some years.

I use an Acer Aspire S7-391 (i5 chip and 128gb SSD) laptop.
It is, or was, excellent. However, following a recent Windows 10 load of updates, things started going bad.
The updates failed and the system rebooted using a restore point...this happened a number of times until eventually Windows would not load properly at all - I could boot the laptop to a blank desktop and no folders or anything were visible.

Using "shift" and restart, I used a number of Windows recovery options, which all failed, culminating in me preparing a Windows 10 64 BIT USB Boot disk and booting the laptop from the USB drive in order to install Windows 10 again.

I thought this would work but the reinstallation of Windows 10 failed on two attempts, at both 6% and then 18% the way through the install.

Fearing a corrupt SSD, I've stripped the MSATA SSD out of the laptop and mounted it into a USB reader.

Using another laptop, I have tried to read the data on the potentially corrupt SSD drive. However, I cannot load any files to view on the SSD through Windows Explorer, which constantly asks me to format the SSD.

*Thank you for reading so far*

Is my laptop issue likely to be a corrupt SSD?

Is there a way I can read the corrupted SSD's files on a working laptop?

Thanks in anticipation.
Regards,
James,
North Wales.
 
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JaredDM

JaredDM

Honorable
Jul 8, 2015
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Acer S7 laptops use a special RAID 0 dual SSD. If you look carefully at the SSD, you'll see that each side is actually a full SSD complete with it's own control chip and NANDs. So it's really two 64Gb SSDs in your case. You'll probably even see the words "mSATA RAID SSD" printed on the board near the connector.

The interface uses a couple pins not normally used as a part of the mSATA specification. So it's a totally proprietary Acer interface. In your adapter, you're only able to read one of the two SSDs and you can't make sense of the data because it's actually a stripe array across the two SSDs which is normally managed by the Acer motherboard itself. So through that adapter you can only read half the data and it's only every other block of the RAID.

I wrote an article about this SSD on a data recovery blog sometime back: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recovery-blog/acer-aspire-s5-s7-ssd-raid-data-recovery/

 
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J

jamesstam

Oct 19, 2018
2
0
10
Jared - thank you very much for your message and article.

To be honest, having read the solutions, I cannot see the data recovery of my SSD being cost effective at present.

May I also pick your brains in relation to replacing the SSD.
Do I have to replace the SSD with the same type (mSATA RAID SSD) or would a normal, relatively common, mSATA SSD be an appropriate replacement?

Thank you.
 
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