Intel X25-M going nuts, please recommend solution

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PsichoDM

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 24, 2006
Messages
161
Hi,

I received my brand new 80GB Intel X25-M yesterday and I plugged it into my box today for the first time. As expected there were no special install steps required: I plugged it in, turned on the pc, was warned by the bios that a new hd was added, then windows turned on and from Computer Management in Server 2008 I formatted the drive as MBR NTFS. Everything seemed to work fine, in fact, being the wunderkind that I am, I started saving some work related stuff onto it, when it blue-screened due to some MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error. Ok I thought, weird... That happened a couple of times again, at different intervals.

So the last time I was using it, once again copying stuff onto the drive, all of a sudden it disappeared completely from Windows. I looked at the system logs and here's what they say:

The device 'INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1GC ATA Device' (IDE\DiskINTEL_SSDSA2MH080G1GC___________________045C8820\5&1a5df48c&0&1.0.0) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, is not ready for access yet.

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort3.

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation.

with the last message being repeated over and over again a hundred times.


I can still see the device from the BIOS, but Windows refuses to detect it..

What do you folks think this could be? Could this simply be a broken SSD that I got and I should get it RMAed? The prob now is that I'm a genius, and I put confidential crap on it, so I'm pretty sure I can't send it back unless I'm 100% sure that all of the contents are completely wiped out.

Any suggestions?
 
I do, I'll plug it into my home machine tonight to give it another try.

What makes me believe that this is drive death is that it worked fine at first, and died all of a sudden. I do agree though that it's worth a try.
 
Don't know if this is related, but my x25-m didn't work properly after I tried to format my HDD from Vista. And I could no longer format it from Vista afterwards.

I had to run HDDERASE (which bypasses Vista) to completely wipe it clean and it worked fine after that. That's the same utility that many reviewers used when testing SSD's so they could restore the drive to a clean state. But even if this doesn't work, it will wipe out any confidential info you put on it.
 
echn111 said:
Don't know if this is related, but my x25-m didn't work properly after I tried to format my HDD from Vista. And I could no longer format it from Vista afterwards.

I had to run HDDERASE (which bypasses Vista) to completely wipe it clean and it worked fine after that. That's the same utility that many reviewers used when testing SSD's so they could restore the drive to a clean state. But even if this doesn't work, it will wipe out any confidential info you put on it.
Click to expand...

Could be it, I'll give that a shot, thx.
 
make sure you update the firmware too never know whats been fixed :)
 
Hi again. I tried to upgrade to the latest firmware as you folks suggested, but the software says that the drive is already up to date.

At this point I went ahead and tried to nuke the drive with HDDErase 3.3 as suggested in this article: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=6

I use the Ultimate Boot CD to boot to dos, and then I run HDDErase from there (I replaced the version of HDDErase on that disk from 4.0 or something relatively recent to 3.3, which is the only one that works apparently). Unfortunately HDDErase is unable to see my drive, it displays P0, P1, S0, S1 all as empty. I also tried every other single HD wiping piece of software on that disk, and whenever they can see my drive (I have to plug it in and out when the pc is off to make it visible again), they start erasing/overwriting, but then lock up half-way.

After attempting to run all of this software, I can still boot into the hard drive with Ultimate Boot CD and all of my data is still there available for reading :(

Do I have any other options besides smashing the drive with a hammer?

Thanks.
 
Did you set standard (compatible) IDE mode in the bios? I think you need to do that to run the erase tool successfully. Also, I think HDDErase 4.0 is supposed to work with the newer X25-M firmware.
 
I made sure that IDE legacy mode or whatever other maximum compatibility options are all on in the BIOS, and I also tried v4.0 of HDDErase to absolutely no avail. HDDErase is perfectly capable of seeing my normal spinny hard drives on the system, but it will not identify the SSD.

Also the sad part is that when I turn on NTFS support drivers on Ultimate Boot CD, I can easily navigate to the SSD and verify that all of my data is still there, although I can't delete it as it's read only.

I contacted Intel's support to see how I can get out of this bs.
 
If possible try and return it as the new drives are coming soon anyway ?
 
madrix said:
If possible try and return it as the new drives are coming soon anyway ?
Click to expand...

That would be ideal, but as I mentioned, I have data on there that I don't want to share with whoever is going to be verifying that the drive is no more functional :)
 
PsichoDM said:
That would be ideal, but as I mentioned, I have data on there that I don't want to share with whoever is going to be verifying that the drive is no more functional :)
Click to expand...

Well I guess you're stuck. Unless somehow it suffers from a weather related watercooling accident (or similar) during the postage process and be completely unreadable by the time it gets to Intel. Get agreement from Intel before returning it though. Get proof that it's malfunctioning and genuinely needs to be replaced first.
 
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