Need help with severe hardware failure :(

[DarkFire]

OK, I have what is by now a very old PC:

 

i7 960 running at 3.2 GHz.

Asus Rampage 3 mother board.

16GB PC2100 RAM.

GTX 760 2Gb graphics card.

Sound Blaster dedicated sound card.

Windows 10 64 bit home edition.

 

I have a 1TB mechanical drive (C drive) that I run windows & most programs on and a 1TB Samsung 850 SSD (J Drive) on which I keep my Steam library, DCS and Ubisoft (I threw up in my mouth a little bit there) games.

 

Last night everything was working perfectly. I get home after work today, turn on the computer as per usual. Everything loads but Steam fails to initialise. I start getting constant messages asking me what I want to do for new removable media - referring to the SSD J drive. This keeps happening. Windows explorer can't see the J drive any more despite the fact that the BIOS recognises that it's there.

 

I've checked to make sure everything's securely plugged in which it is. The only difference between yesterday night and this afternoon is that it's hot as hell here today (31 C), but I've never had any thermal issues with the computer before.

 

End effect is that I've now lost access to my entire load of installed games - about 920 GB worth. Have I got a dead SSD or is this Windows 10's doing?

 

Ultimately it doesn't matter because my new gaming rig should be here next week, but I wanted to sell this one to a friend (cheap as it's obsolete) as a working system, which I can't do if the SSD is borked.

 

Anyone experience anything similar?

[BitMaster]

It only takes ONE cell to die and your WHOLE ssd is DEAD !

 

When it comes to such a bad point, SSD's have a clear disadvantage compared to standard mechanical platter driven drives, those usually give you an EARLY WARNING through SMART.

 

The Bios might well still recognize the drive but if the logicboard in your SSD blocks, no system will be able to access it.

 

Hope you have a backup ?!

 

One last thing, a sentence I keep repeating for 20y as admin now:

 

MAKE A BACKUP WHILE YOU STILL CAN !!!!!!!!!!!

 

Bit

[BitMaster]

THere is 1 thing you can do to may get your SSD back, but only IF IT IS NOT the drive itself but a bug in Win10 that is well known and I am unaware that MS fixed it.

 

DELETE your Intel SATA controller and subentries from Hardware Manager, reboot...done.

 

WHY ?

In some scenarios Win10 refuses to "see" a drive attached to your Sata bus UNTIL you delete the controller(s) and let Win10 reinstall them automatically upon reboot, while it does so it ALSO rebinds all your attached drives as it should. Had that myself multiple times with various systems

[DarkFire]

Thanks for the advice but sadly that didn't work. Pretty sure I have a dead SSD, which considering it's less than 4 months old is pretty disappointing. Very disappointing as everything I'd read before buying it suggested that the Samsung 850s are supposed to be ultra-reliable. Ah well. The only good thing is that it should still be within the guarantee period so I should be able to get a replacement.