SSD is no longer recognized

[Jenkins453]

Recently I had been having issues with frequent hard locking, as I had asked in another post just the other day. To help combat that issue, I unhooked everything and dusted it out and made sure all of the cables were still attached firmly to their proper places. After the dusting, I put my pc back into its spot and then plugged it back in. Now here is the new issue that has arisen: the SSD is readable and recognized in BIOS but despite this, it is unable to boot from it. I've tried disabling secure boot, CSM, doing all variations of the two all without success, boot orders (only the ssd is installed currently though)... I'm now out of ideas. It was booting from the SSD not even 10 minutes ago, and now nothing. It knows it's there, but is unable to boot from it. Also, I did notice that it seemed like my settings in bios had been reverted to defaults as well and I'm not sure why since the cmos battery was never removed. I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any help and ideas are welcome

 

[lllk4]

Im not sure this would help bit you could try this:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Im not sure the problem but this might be able to help you out

Also dose your mothervoard have error code such as patterns of beeps woth on board speekers or a small led that displays numbers?

 

[Jenkins453]

Simply put, the issue is this: my SSD and everything was fine (my entire pc essentially) minus a hard locked issue that happened randomly. I cleaned out my pc and now my SSD is no longer able to be booted from. And there is no error codes, it just won't boot from my solid state all of a sudden

 

[Dugimodo]

If the BIOS has defaulted check the hard drive mode is set the same as before. Changing from Legacy IDE or SATA to AHCI or RAID will prevent booting.
You should be using AHCI for an SSD but if you weren't before it could be your problem.

 

[Jenkins453]

So I tried changing from AHCI to SATA and Legacy which both provided different messages. AHCI left me with this "reboot and select proper boot device" while Legacy IDE left me with "A disk read error has occurred, press ctrl+alt+del to restart" which restarting obviously gives the same message every time. I've never once used a raid configuration on any of my computers. If it helps any, I'm on the ASUS uefi bios utility. Is there anything else I could try?

 

[Jenkins453]

I forgot to add this: when I changed the SATA configuration to IDE, my bios began to recognize my second hard drive (storage only) again, so that's some progress at least. It seems as if it just can't boot from the SSD though

 

[Jenkins453]

Update 2: I decided to just reinstall windows using the optimized default bios settings. Worked long enough to let me get some stuff installed, then when I restarted (because some apps required that) it just goes to a black screen and nothing happens. This most recent time at startup, it went to Windows recovery almost immediately

 

[Dugimodo]

Sounds a bit like a drive failure but it's very coincidental with the timing which is suspicious. When you re-installed windows did you leave both drives connected? best to disconnect the storage drive or the windows installer will put some boot files there and then you need both drives connected to boot properly and either one of them could be causing your issues. A stupid behaviour on MSs part but that's another discussion.

I think you need to do some disk diagnosis, preferably with the manufacturers utilities if available. However you need a working PC to do that so unless you have another machine available you may not be able to. A bootable USB or CD image with some hard drive checking software could be an Idea, one was suggested in the first reply.

 

[Jenkins453]

Yeah, with the initial hard locking issues and error codes in event viewer which lead me to believe the power supply was having problems, maybe it shot my drives as well... hopefully not. When I reinstalled windows 10, I only had the ssd inside the machine at the time. I work at a tech center actually, so I can take the drives in to work tomorrow and see if they pass or fail there. So just to ask, you don't think it could be any setting in bios at this point do you? I was leaning towards a part failure myself by now, but a second opinion never hurts

 

[Dugimodo]

It seems unlikely, if the machine works well enough to install windows and start installing apps then I wouldn't be looking at the BIOS as the cause.
Should have suggested earlier, but it could also be a RAM issue and you should do an extended memtest to check that or remove all but 1 stick of RAM at a time to try and eliminate. Memory errors can look like drive errors because all your copy operations pass through RAM so it can be misleading. RAM can also cause the lockups you started with.

Also if you do re-install windows set the drive to AHCI mode first if it's not by default, it works much better and enables Trim support but you can't easily switch to it after installing because windows needs AHCI drivers to boot. Older versions of windows will need a driver disk for this to work though and it's not the end of the world to use legacy mode, just not preferred.

 

[Jenkins453]

Not sure why I never thought of ram, but I took all but 1 stuck out and what would you know! Booted right up without incident. I suppose it was one of the sticks. I'll begin testing them, and to be on the safe side I'll test my other 2 storage hard drives as well. As for now though, it's on and from what I can tell fully operational