Can anyone fix a broken NVME/M.2 SSD?
9 months ago
Does anyone have the ability, or know anyone... who can restore a broken NVME/M.2 SSD to working condition?
I lost a lot of personal data, and a lot of memories with it. :(
I don't expect it for free. I can offer art, as well as money once my finances improve.
The computer does not detect it as a boot option in the bios.
When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again.
I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux.
I ordered an enclosure from amazon to test it further this week.
EDIT:
SIGH OF RELIEF.
I realized that I moved those files from the old hard drive to the (now) dead one.....
So I ran a data recovery program on that OLD drive...
And now I have recovered the overwhelming majority of those precious memories. ;-;
Now it is "Acceptable losses."
I'm still pissed that I lost a year of art files and lost a good chunk of progress on my assorted projects... but it was the personal/precious/memories that I was really grieving over, and now that I have almost all of them back, I feel better. Just.... emotionally exhausted.
Now I can approach this with a more rational state of mind.
Thank you all for your information/advice!
I lost a lot of personal data, and a lot of memories with it. :(
I don't expect it for free. I can offer art, as well as money once my finances improve.
The computer does not detect it as a boot option in the bios.
When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again.
I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux.
I ordered an enclosure from amazon to test it further this week.
EDIT:
SIGH OF RELIEF.
I realized that I moved those files from the old hard drive to the (now) dead one.....
So I ran a data recovery program on that OLD drive...
And now I have recovered the overwhelming majority of those precious memories. ;-;
Now it is "Acceptable losses."
I'm still pissed that I lost a year of art files and lost a good chunk of progress on my assorted projects... but it was the personal/precious/memories that I was really grieving over, and now that I have almost all of them back, I feel better. Just.... emotionally exhausted.
Now I can approach this with a more rational state of mind.
Thank you all for your information/advice!
When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again.
I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux.
I ordered an enclosure from amazon to test it further this week.
if it's actually physically busted then your best bet is not touching it until you have a chance (and money) to get it to a data retrieval company, but expect high prices depending on what is wrong
When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again.
I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux.
I ordered an enclosure from amazon to test it further this week.
Does your computer detect it at all? have you tried it on another computer?
When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again.
I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux.
I ordered an enclosure from amazon to test it further this week.
The fact that it doesn't detect at all, makes me think something maybe the memory controller on it died, but it's basically impossible to know without proper diagnostic tools.
Sadly, going to have to agree with other commenters, that it would need to be sent to a specialist, which usually involves them physically removing the blocks and putting them on some sort or reader. and that's a gamble, depending on what died in it.
Could get lucky, and everything is intact, just inaccessible, or could have take large chunks of it out with it, again, depending on what failed.
As for the cost, it can vary wildly, like I said, it usually involves them physically removing the memory chips from the NVMe and putting them on some special reader. From a quick glance, seems to vary based on capacity of drive.
Wish I had a better answer for you :<
if it's real important, you should stop attempting to use the drive now, and you can look up data recovery specialists and they can possibly give you options, but expect it to cost a lot, or for nothing to be able to be done, SSD speeds are rad but yeah, gotta have more redundancy since they can suddenly *poof* after a few years
You could in the future, run some of the following:
Raid - Certain setups for Raid Drives give you data parity so that if a drive fails you retain your data. NVME drives are getting pretty cheap, the limiting factor can be your available NVME slots and motherboard compatibility, this is a local backup. On the plus side, you keep your data if one drive fails, the downside is your data is still in one spot.
Nas Server: Fairly easy to set up if you have an old or spare computer in the house, You can use some Hard Drives to create a local backup, you can set your computer to automatically, with some programs or settings to backup, or do it manually. Pros It is a completely separate machine and can be accessed if the main computer fails completely or catastrophically, Cons is requires having a second computer and can be cumbersome to get going.
Google Drive or other online service. This depends on how you feel about cloud services companies, and how much data you specifically want to backup. Some people do just absorb the cost as part of doing business, but it's extremely easy to set up a Google Drive backup for a folder on your computer. There are pricing tiers and such to consider. This is kind of a setup and forget, and your data is accessible anywhere you are logged in. So there is no one point of failure for your data. I recommend setting this up with an account separate from your browsing account, with a different password than one you'd normally use.
Then there are portable drives. And there are levels of portable drives. This one can get a bit more complicated, but basically, there are two main types, spinning backup and SSDs, and the reliability of some of them can be hard to determine. I recommend reading reviews on the selling sites and looking up individual drives before you buy one. Otherwise, buy and ironwolf pro or something similar, and put it in an enclosure yourself. Pros: Easy to do, can be cheaper, and depending on how you go about it more reliable. The downside is one drop, losing the drive, or having it stolen you are back to square one (With someone possibly having your data).
In short losing data blows, it's always a good idea to have at least two backups of critical or work related data.
However, it's likely the controller chip is not responding, and if that's the case, the drive cannot be repaired, because that chip controls the internal mappings. It's not like a hard drive controller board where compatible models can have their boards (or chips) swapped.
*wince* That's... not good. Not horrible, but not good. Contents may still be intact.
"When it's inserted into a motherboard, it causes the splash screen to hang for a very long time before it goes back to the BIOS again."
Boot sector could be ker-put, controller could be ker-put, but the fact its at least hanging, rather than outright saying that there is 'nothing' there is something.
"I had it tested at best buy, and they said it does not show up on their caddy/enclosure device. I do not know if they used linux."
They might be using a PCI-E card insert for it, and if its not showing up there... Hard to say as I've seen proprietary-type stuff for that purpose.
Check with the manufacturer if you can. If its within warranty, they may be able to transfer anything on there to a new one. Maybe data recovery services. Other than that, you might be SOL for that.
I wanted to give you a recommendation for FreeFileSync, which I use in combination with two portable SSDs, a folder that is connected to/monitored by a cloud, and Windows' Task Scheduler (although I'm sure there's other similar on other systems) to run automated hourly backups of my writing and critical files (to the SSDs and cloud), then daily backups of everything else (to the SSDs only).
Although there's definitely an upfront cost to buy a girthy SSD or two from a reliable brand (as they CAN fail, but way less often than HDDs, and they seem to be less fragile/prone to physical damage), I really recommend it, as the software's free (with no adverts or freemium nonsense), it's easy to set up (once the hardware's bought), and once it's all set up, you don't have to do anything or even have to remember to run it every once in a while; it just does all the backups automatically and in the background, at pre-determined times.
Reading this note over, it DOES kinda sound like an advert, but it's still some advice that I thought might be useful; especially as it saved me a LOT of headache and stress back in June when my HDD abruptly gave up and died so hard that NOTHING was recoverable (even after the repair shop had been running recovery software for a full month), as all I lost was a couple of hundred words of one scene I was writing.