They are bricked. I would have happily re-installed Windows 7 since my data was on other drives, but the drive was inaccessible. I have my drive boxed up and ready to mail tomorrow morning unless Intel is able to wave a magic wand and tell me how to fix it. I've scared myself off of SSDs for a few years and would probably never touch an Intel SSD again. I'll gladly take a 5% real world performance hit for a drive that doesn't have a history of bricking itself when a firmware update is applied.