Why do I have to re-install Windows 7 OS on my SSD occasionally??? Ugh

814132506

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Hello all. I had my friend build me a pc about 3 months ago and he said to get an ssd as they are newer technology and way better than the old hdd. I am a novice when it comes to most of the computer jargon but can understand most of the basic concepts. Here's my question........Why do I have to re-install my Windows 7 os back onto my ssd about every month and a half when it seems to just take a dive on me? I have been reading a little bit about ssd trim and wiping and am pretty clueless as to what this means and how to prevent it from doing this in the near future. This is turning out to be a royal pain in the arse and I am thinking about saying the hell with having a ssd to go back and only use a hdd. Tired of having to re-install numerous things. The ssd card is an OCZ Vertex 3 series 120 GB. PLEASE HELP
 
Has nothing to do with Trim or Garbage Collection. You have either faulty hardware or the worst case of recurrent malware that I have ever heard of.

Something is defective, either on the motherboard or on the SSD. You can download diagnostics from OCZ and do an extended test on the drive; if it fails, return it for a new one. I sincerely hope that you keep backups.

What exactly happens when you need to re-install it? Does the system freeze, fail to boot, say that no boot device is found? Could the boot failure be due to some other component failing?
 
^ +1
(1) 2nd the more info and why you need to reinstall on a monthly basis. Have 4 computers, all with SSDs, and have jet to have to reinstall the operating system.
(2) The first check I would do is download as ssd. Open the program and verify that the Driver is the correct driver (upper left). For an intel based computer it should show msachi or iaSTor. AS SSD will also show an OL for partition alignment. NOTE: the Bios should be set to AHCI!!
(3) OCZ Sata III SSDs use the SF22xx controller and are more probmatic than than thoes based on the Marvel controller (ie Intel 510 and curcial M4). To check the drive do as WyomingKnott indicated - hop over to OCZ and download the Toolbox. (Verify that you are using the latest firmware for the drive, if not update to newest firmware. I believe it is 2.11
(4) If system is an intel based, the SSD should be on the INtel SATA III port, NOT the marvel sata III port. And again do you have the latest Intel driver (ver 10.6)

Added: Reinstalling the operating system and all programs is about a 10->15 min procedure for win 7. You create a image file of your C drive using windows back up. To re-install you just pop a windows 7 installation disk in and select to re-install the image.
 
I understand you have an OCZ Vertex 3, I have an Vertex 2 and they may not be the same, but I had a similar issue.

When I first got my Vertex 2 - all was good for about 4-5 months. All of a sudden my SSD would not boot. I found out that there was a new firmware fix for a bug that occurs once in a while that wipes out the entire OS. After the firmware update- i've never had an issue since.

Maybe try updating your firmware.
 

814132506

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Thank you for all of the replies so far....When this problem with the computer happens the screen freezes for about 10 seconds then the computer shuts down. When it reboots it says "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." The computer stays at this screen everytime I reboot unless I put in the Windows 7 disc and format the partition and reinstall. I'll include the pc components below. If anymore info is needed let me know. Thanks again.

Background on AMD pc:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Antec KUHLER H2O 920 Liquid Cooling System

ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

COOLER MASTER Silent Pro RSA00-AMBAJ3-US 1000W ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V v2.92 SLI Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active

XFX HD-697A-CNFC Radeon HD 6970 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDE00ZFBGRBOX

CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9

OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
 

814132506

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Ok...Before GeekApproved's post I did look at the boot sequence and for some reason the ssd had been changed to the 2nd boot device instead of the first. I have no idea how that changed so I put it back to the first and seem to be making progress on getting the pc to run again. I will do the Ocz test which was spoken of above and make sure the firmware is current. And when I tried to repair the OS it said it can't which is why I just format it and re-install.
 

I used to have problems with the boot order changing randomly. I finally put my SSD on SATA port number one. Now, every time the motherboard scrambles the boot order, it grabs the SSD as the default boot drive and I have no more problems - with boot order, anyway.
 

814132506

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Was just looking at the bios screen to see if I could find anything goofy. I wanted to make sure that settings for the ssd card were ok. Should it be on ide, ahci or raid?
 

814132506

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Went ahead and tried swapping things around and changed the ssd to ahci. After I did that no drives were being detected. Put it back to IDE and removed the ssd card. My friend took it to his place to update the firmware and do diagnostics on it as I was having problems trying to get the hdd to be my primary along with getting windows on it. I'll get it all back together this weekend and give an update. Thanks everyone for the help, it's very well appreciated :)
 
You can not just change "horses" in mid stream.
Same with changing drivers for a Hard drive (SSD or HDD). In this case the drive had the drivers for pci stored in the registry and you changed the bios to ahci. There is a way to convert with a registry edit first. Will post a link, but you may be better off having your friend (or yourself): (1) set the bios to AHCI and (2) reload operating system on SSD. (3) May need to do this first, if you have data on the HDD and can not see it with the bios set to ahci then you need to first back-up your data.

Link:
1. Exit all Windows-based programs.
2. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
3. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
4. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
5. In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

Then go into your BIOS and set AHCI for your SATA drives. Upon boot windows will install the proper driver and you'll be set.
 

814132506

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Went back to my buddies and got the ssd card and gave that a shot and it switched it over to ahci and everythings still working. Now onto getting that card updated tonight.

Encountered another problem while trying to update the ssd....I have the hdd as the primary now and the ssd as the secondary so I can update as far as the bios is concerned. When I boot up the pc and try to install Windows on the hdd it says "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style." I'm also noticing in this screen for where to install the windows both the hdd and ssd are showing up as primary??? Seems like every problem I am getting past 2 more will pop up. :cry:

I don't have much on my hdd except some music and games so I am going to reformat the hdd and set the partition to mbr so I can get Windows 7 up on it and be able to finally update the firmware on the ssd to possibly fix the original problem. From what I understand you really aren't suppose to use gpt for hdd under 2.2 terabytes however I'm a noob and could be wrong about this but wth lol.
 

tekneek

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flash the ssd to atleast *.11 bios a known problem with ocz ssd and use the linux standalone method , you'll find the details on the ocz website

i am also getting blue screens everytime i update windows 7 64 setting back to achi from raid then updating windows then reinstalling IRST works except for boot speed i am sure there is a missing link with the new IRST
 

814132506

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I was finally able to update the firmware for the ssd card however I am unable to find the diagnostics from the OCZ website to do an extended test on it. I found some information that might be helpful from the toolbox I downloaded from OCZ when I updated the firmware. Hope this is enough to say whether it's the ssd or not and what other ideas of things might be causing the issue:

SMART READ DATA
Revision: 10
Attributes List
1: SSD Raw Read Error Rate Normalized Rate: 120 total ECC and RAISE errors
5: SSD Retired Block Count Reserve blocks remaining: 100%
9: SSD Power-On Hours Total hours power on: 455
12: SSD Power Cycle Count Count of power on/off cycles: 1
171: SSD Program Fail Count Total number of Flash program operation failures: 0
172: SSD Erase Fail Count Total number of Flash erase operation failures: 0
174: SSD Unexpected power loss count Total number of unexpected power loss: 38
177: SSD Wear Range Delta Delta between most-worn and least-worn Flash blocks: 0
181: SSD Program Fail Count Total number of Flash program operation failures: 0
182: SSD Erase Fail Count Total number of Flash erase operation failures: 0
187: SSD Reported Uncorrectable Errors Uncorrectable RAISE errors reported to the host for all data access: 0
194: SSD Temperature Monitoring Current: 128 High: 129 Low: 127
195: SSD ECC On-the-fly Count Normalized Rate: 100
196: SSD Reallocation Event Count Total number of reallocated Flash blocks: 0
201: SSD Uncorrectable Soft Read Error Rate Normalized Rate: 100
204: SSD Soft ECC Correction Rate (RAISE) Normalized Rate: 100
230: SSD Life Curve Status Current state of drive operation based upon the Life Curve: 100
231: SSD Life Left Approximate SSD life Remaining: 100%
241: SSD Lifetime writes from host Number of bytes written to SSD: 482 GB
242: SSD Lifetime reads from host Number of bytes read from SSD: 665 GB
 

Yes, the can't-install inssue is because the disk was initialized as GPT. Only motherboards with UEFI, which are rare, can boot from these.

"showing up as primary" probably means that you look in Disk Manager and see that the partitions are "primary partitions." This is fine unless you need more than four partitions on an MBR-formatted drive. Primary and Secondary as terms for disk, like Master and Slave, are obsolete - they referred to the status of two IDE drives on the same cable and did not determine which would boot.

If you have an external drive, you can copy the data from your HDD to it and put it back once you have re-initialized the drive. Or you may have enough free space on the SSD!

Finally, I haven't checked this but you can probably get a DOS-mode firmware updater, and download any number of free DOS-based boot environments that you can burn to a CD. Then you could update the firmware without doing an install that you intend to abandon.

Keep us posted; I'm curious to know what the solution is.