What Happens When a Storage Drive Fails

[boiler1990]

Hey all,

My laptop is experiencing some issues and I'm wondering if it's my SSD.

Specs:
Toshiba Portege R835-P56X
8GB RAM
128GB Kingston SSDNow V100

I shut it down and can't get anything other than a black screen with my cursor (I try booting to all 3 safe modes and regular Windows), and my laptop detects issues with the drive and recommends scanning (which it does with CHKDSK).

I'm hoping it's just the drive, but it's odd that it *almost* boots to Windows and then just doesn't entirely get there.

Thanks!

 

[rolli59]

Have you tried repair install of windows? Looks like windows can not find all the files after running CHKDSK

 

[boiler1990]

I can't try just yet because I don't have my discs with me on vacation but I'm going to try when I get back

 

[boiler1990]

So my dad found his W7 Ultimate discs for me and when I tried a repair, the SSD didnt show up or let me try to repair it. I feel like thats proof enough that the SSD is dead...

 

[boiler1990]

Thought I would mess around with the Installation tools and am now confused. When doing a fresh install, the drive appears in the list as shown in the picture below.

My next question is: are there drivers that I should be installing for the recovery tools? How do I find out what drivers I need and where to get them?

 

[rolli59]

The drive appears in both screen shots! Did you try the recovery? In the second shot it should give an options to repair in the next step if you select the primary partition.

 

[boiler1990]

The first shot only shows the DVD drive (D) and not the SSD (C). I will revisit the second screen though

 

[rolli59]

Looks like your drive letters washed around since the win7 partition size does not make sense.

 

[boiler1990]

I tried to repair the drive in the first screen shot but it kept saying there was no Windows installation because it was reading the disc. Im so confused... *sigh*

 

[boiler1990]

The other day I scoured through the recovery menu, and I could not restore from any of my restore points, and I don't have any recovery images to try and restore. Also found out that the (D) drive in the first picture is my (C) drive in Windows - recovery tools read the (C) drive as the 100MB Reserved Partition.

I also heard back from Kingston Tech Support, and all they recommended to do was erase my drive using HDDErase and reinstall Windows. Not extremely helpful if you ask me (at least, beyond what I was going to do).

 

[rolli59]

If you can not repair the installation then that might be the only thing you can do apart from format and reinstall. Here is a guide for repair install http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html

 

[boiler1990]

I cant get into windows to do a repair installation though :/

Part of me is hoping a reinstallation fails and Kingston works out an RMA.

 

[boiler1990]

So I did a format and reinstall, and everything seems to be working. SSDLife says the drive is at 90% health and it's still as speedy as ever. Must have been a freak corruption of a file or something...

 

[boiler1990]

Best answer selected by boiler1990.