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I have a Computer running Windows 11, with a Gigabyte Z690i Ultra DDR4 motherboard and a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB SSD.

It's been working perfectly for months, but a couple of days ago when I started it up it entered the BIOS and refused to boot.

There is no error message related to booting on the screen before entering the BIOS -- it just goes straight there.

The SSD appears in the BIOS Settings/IO Ports/NVMe Configuration page

If I try to run BIOS diagnostics on the SSD, the BIOS hangs.

I can boot successfully from my Windows install USB stick.

If I go to Repair, and open the command prompt, I can go to my C: drive, and my files appear to all be there.

If I try to reinstall Windows, I get to the "Windows Setup" dialog, and I can see four partitions on my drive:

System 100MB
MSR (Reserved) 16MB
Primary 1862GB
Recovery 570MB

I try to install on Primary, but I get a message: "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one"

I haven't tried formatting the drive, as even though everything important is in the cloud, I'm hoping to avoid setting everything up again...

How can I make this machine boot again?

tgdavies
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2 Answers2

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Sounds like something is going to potentially die, soon.

Backup now if you haven't recently. Use a proper (non-windows) tool.

After that, flash your BIOS with a manufacturer disc, then try whatever windows does to repair boot issues.

Then try and work out the failure mode. But I suspect a new SSD in your near future.

mitts
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It seems that this is the behaviour you see when the SSD has failed into read-only mode.

I attached another drive and installed Windows on it.

This works perfectly.

I can now see that the original Samsung 980 PRO 2TB is read-only.

When I run Samsung's own "Magician" software, the "Drive Dashboard" shows "Drive Health Critical, 5.1TB Written" (which seems odd to me -- I thought these should survive writing at least 100TB)

The S.M.A.R.T. button brings up a window which shows that "Available Spare" is zero, so I guess that's the problem.

I don't have a large enough replacement drive to attempt to copy the read-only drive and boot from it, so I'll update this answer with that process when I have a new drive.

Update

I got a new drive and installed them both in my machine. I downloaded "Macrium Reflect Free" and tried to clone the drive. I got a "Failed to create volume snapshot" in Macrium, and ran its "Fix VSS problems" command. That didn't help, same "Failed to create volume snapshot" message. I read through various KB and forum posts, but no luck.

Then I tried Samsung's own data migration tool -- but as far as I can see, that only allows migration from your boot disk! :facepalm:

Then I followed the instructions from this answer: https://superuser.com/a/1712902/127864 I made a Rufus bootable USB drive with SystemRescue. I tried dd, but that died after 50GB, so I used ddrescue instead. I just used the default parameters: ddrescue <src> <dst> -f.

That took about 12 hours to run, and told me that there were about 100MB of bad sectors.

I booted off the new SSD (after removing the old one, because they had a signature(?) conflict which prevented windows recognising the clone)

Everything seems fine, a Windows scan of the drive found no errors, WSL2 works, etc.

tgdavies
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