A solid-state drive, compared to a hard drive, has such advantages as a high level of performance and reliability, low power consumption, lack of noise, and much more. Therefore, more and more users are choosing SSD as their system one. When connecting such a drive, you may find that it is not detected by the system or is not even displayed in the BIOS. This may look like there is no disk in "Explorer", Windows settings or in the BIOS boot selection list.
Problems with displaying the SSD in the system can occur for reasons such as a missing drive letter or initialization, the presence of hidden partitions, and a file system incompatible with Windows. At the same time, this may occur due to incorrect BIOS settings and physical damage to the disk itself or one of the connection elements between the motherboard and the SSD.
Reason 1: The disk is not initialized
It often happens that a new disk is not initialized when connected to a computer and, as a result, it is not visible in the system. The solution is to perform the procedure manually according to the following algorithm.
- Press simultaneously "Win+R" and in the window that appears, enter compmgmt.msc. Then click "OK".
- A window will open where you need to click "Disk Management".
- Right-click on the desired drive and select from the menu that opens "Initialize disk".
- Next, make sure that in the field "Disc 1" check the box, and place a marker next to the item mentioning MBR or GPT. "Master Boot Record" compatible with all versions of Windows, but if you plan to use only current releases of this OS, it is better to choose "Table with GUID partitions".
- After completing the procedure, you should create a new partition. To do this, click on the disk and select "Create Simple Volume".
- Will open "New Volume Wizard", in which we press "Further".
- Then you need to specify the size. You can leave the default value, which is the maximum disk size, or select a smaller value. After making the necessary changes, click "Further".
- In the next window, agree with the proposed volume letter option and click "Further". If desired, you can assign another letter, the main thing is that it does not coincide with the existing one.
- Next you need to perform formatting. Leave the recommended values in the fields "File system", "Volume Label" and in addition we enable the option "Quick Format".
- Click "Ready".
As a result, the disk should appear in the system.
Reason 2: Missing drive letter
Sometimes the SSD does not have a letter and therefore does not appear in "Explorer". In this case, you need to assign a letter to it.
After this, the specified information storage device is recognized by the OS, and standard operations can be performed with it.
Reason 3: Missing partitions
If the purchased disc is not new and has already been used for a long time, it may also not appear in "My computer". The reason for this may be damage to the system file or MBR table due to a crash, infection by a virus file, improper operation, etc. In this case, the SSD is displayed in "Disk Management", but his status is "Not initialized". In this case, it is usually recommended to perform initialization, but due to the risk of data loss, it is still not worth doing this.
In addition, a situation is also possible in which the drive is displayed as one unallocated area. Creating a new volume as usual may also result in data loss. The solution here may be to restore the partition. To do this, you need certain knowledge and software, for example, MiniTool Partition Wizard, which has the appropriate option.
This should help solve the problem, but in a situation where there is no necessary knowledge and the necessary data is on the disk, it is better to turn to professionals.
Reason 4: Hidden section
Sometimes an SSD is not visible in Windows due to the presence of a hidden partition. This is possible if the user has hidden the volume using third-party software to prevent access to the data. The solution is to restore the partition using disk software. The same MiniTool Partition Wizard copes well with this task.
After this, hidden sections will appear in "Explorer".
Reason 5: Unsupported file system
If after performing the above steps the SSD still does not appear in "Explorer" It's possible that the disk's file system is different from FAT32 or NTFS, which Windows works with. Typically, such a drive appears in the disk manager as an area "RAW". To fix the problem, you need to follow the following algorithm.
Reason 6: Problems with BIOS and hardware
There are four main reasons why the BIOS does not detect the presence of an internal SSD.
SATA is disabled or has the wrong mode
Incorrect BIOS settings
The BIOS will also not recognize the drive if the settings are incorrect. This can be easily checked by the system date - if it does not correspond to the true one, this indicates a failure. To eliminate it, you need to reset and return to standard settings according to the sequence of actions below.
Alternatively, you can remove the battery, which in our case is located next to the PCIe connectors.
Data cable is faulty
The BIOS will also not detect the SSD if the CATA cable is damaged. In this case, you need to check all connections between the motherboard and the SSD. It is advisable not to allow any bends or pinching of the cable when laying. All this can lead to damage to the wires inside the insulation, although externally the material may look normal. If there is any doubt about the condition of the cable, it is better to replace it. When connecting SATA devices, Seagate recommends using cables less than 1 meter in length. Longer ones can sometimes fall out of the connectors, so be sure to check that they are firmly connected to the SATA ports.
Failed SSD
If after carrying out the above procedures the disk is still not shown in the BIOS, most likely there is a manufacturing defect or physical damage to the device. Here you need to contact a computer repair shop or SSD supplier, first making sure that there is a warranty.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at the reasons for the absence of a solid-state drive in the system or in the BIOS when it is connected. The source of such a problem can be either the condition of the disk or cable, or various software glitches and incorrect settings. Before proceeding with the fix using one of the listed methods, it is recommended to check all connections between the SSD and the motherboard and try replacing the SATA cable.
Restoring hard drives and other storage devices is one of the activities of our service center. Often, clients who request hard drive repair actually want to return data from a broken hard drive, but are unable to express their desire in a way that is clear without additional questions. In our company, if necessary, it is possible to repair a hard drive (HDD) in 100% of cases, without exceptions.
You just need to take into account that restoring a HDD of any complexity category implies a complete and irreversible loss of user information on a broken hard drive. This is due to the characteristics of those. the process of the work itself and post-repair testing of the hard drive. Below I will try to analyze the main types of faults that the owner of a broken HDD who wants to restore the hard drive may encounter and describe methods and ways to eliminate them. So, problems with HDD can be divided into the following main groups:
Problems with the HDD surface
The so-called bad blocks. What is a bad block? Essentially, this is a sector, when accessed, the disk does not receive a valid sector checksum. This may be the case if the sector is not readable as such, or the sector is readable but the KS field is corrupted. Various reasons, however, can be eliminated in one way - by attempting to rewrite the entire sector, including the service information field. If we are dealing with a soft bad block, then after rewriting the sector checksum will be corrected. If the defect is, as they say, physical, then most modern drives, when rewritten in automatic mode, will replace the bad block or exclude it from the broadcast. As a last resort, you can manually enter the unreadable sector into the factory table of defects and recalculate the translator.
If the hard drive needs repair and bad sectors are not found in a single copy, then the problem is more serious. Much can be judged by observing the presence or absence of patterns in the location of bads. So, for example, regularly recurring groups of defects can be caused by the failure of one or more heads in the magnetic head package. And unstable defects (located in different places on different re-reads) may indicate a malfunction of the electronics board or the rotation stabilization system of the spindle motor.
It is also common to encounter problems that appeared as a result of the factory adaptive settings being lost due to the natural wear and tear of the hard drive. In this case, you need to run a factory self-test cycle to recalculate the individual hard drive trim tables.
Problems with the HDD controller
I would like to note right away that the phrase “the HDD controller burned out” or “the controller on the hard drive broke” is incorrect; in fact, we are talking about the hard drive electronics board, in English - logical board of HDD.
Different families of hard drives have their own proprietary problems with boards. For example, WD drives are famous for their disregard for protection against polarity reversals and power surges, which is reflected in the total burnout of all circuits on the board and the preamplifier/switch in the hermetic zone. In some cases, when it is necessary to restore hard drives, it makes sense to repair the original board, but in other situations it is easier to replace it entirely.
We must not forget that on modern drives the adaptive settings necessary for the initial start of the hard drive are integrated into the ROM. When starting, some HDDs rely on the cylinder number, which should be used to search for tracks with service information, and when starting with someone else's ROM, they do not undergo complex initialization. Others, without starting adaptives, are not able to position themselves according to the servo markings at all and when starting up with someone else’s board they simply knock. Again, the approach to repairing different models in the event of loss of the original ROM will be different. In some places you can assemble an original ROM from modules in the service area, gaining access to it by selecting offsets, but in other places you need to use a brute force method to select a compatible one from the firmware database.
Problems with HDD firmware
I was forced to use another extremely incorrect phrase “hard drive firmware”. In fact, this is what ignorant people call the HDD firmware. In the future I will use exactly this phrase - firmware or microcode of the hard drive, in its different variations.
A common malfunction is when, due to damage to one or more modules, the disk is unable to initialize correctly. This happens both in case of logical failures (violation of the service module header or its contents resulting from a failure during recording or updating) and in case of physical damage to the surface under the service information. Less common are problems with hard drive microcode that stem from errors in the firmware itself, causing the drive to fail as a result of a failure to update, say, SMART tables.
In most cases, this problem can be easily resolved. Sometimes, in order to repair a hard drive, you need to update the drive’s firmware to the latest version recommended by the manufacturer; sometimes it is enough to simply rewrite damaged modules from copies or from a similar device so that the drive will work correctly again when the power is restarted.
Problems with HDD containment
The so-called can, the hard drive housing itself, where the spindle motor, a package of platters, a head unit, etc. are mounted. Malfunctions here can be very diverse, ranging from jamming of the spindle motor and ending with the failure of one or more heads, or even the entire BMG in in general.
In the event that one or more heads in the package are faulty, provided that the malfunction of the heads is not caused by damage to the plates (cuts), you can repair the hard drive by disabling the faulty head programmatically. For these purposes, appropriate changes are made to the map of the physical heads of the drive and a full cycle of the HDD factory self-test script is launched. The output is a disk with a reduced volume. Actually, this is exactly the path that refurbished discs from China and Korea follow. The only difference is that on these discs a sticker with a modified model (smaller volume) is glued on top or the whole thing is re-glued. At more serious Chinese enterprises that are engaged in refarming on an industrial scale, with the official approval of the manufacturer, the disks are disassembled entirely, the parts are sorted, the servo marks are re-marked and the disks are put back together. At the final stage of the pipeline recovery of broken hard drives, all restored disks undergo a self-scan and ultimately work like new.
In Russian, more modest conditions, when HDD repair is required in cases where the problem is in the hermetic zone and to eliminate it requires opening the hermetic chamber, then the hermetic zone is changed entirely to a serviceable one to carry out repair work, without opening it. The same method is used to repair disks with a jammed motor, sawed-off platters, and other serious malfunctions in the hard drive bank. If a complete replacement of the HDA is necessary to restore the hard drive, then the original sticker is removed with a special device and then pasted onto a new can, followed by hot rolling.
Our laboratory has specialized equipment and spare parts, and repairs the most common ones: hard drive (hard drive, HDD) Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Hitachi, Samsung, Toshiba.
SSD recovery
Very generally, an SSD disk consists of the control part itself, which houses the central processor, RAM, cache, power converters and interface (SATA or USB, sometimes combined) and the data storage itself, usually based on NAND memory chips. The appearance of SSD drives on the data storage market is quite natural. Compared to classic HDDs, SSD drives have serious advantages: mechanical reliability due to the absence of moving parts, a significant increase in read/write speed, smaller dimensions and lower power consumption. But when it comes to the reliability of storing information, SSD drives have nothing to brag about.
The bottleneck of SSD drives is the low resource of MLC memory chips, despite attempts to increase it by distributing loads across cells using XOR algorithms and internal block mixes. SSD drives can break due to electrical breakdown, etc. control part, failure of one or more NAND Flash memory or software failures in the microcontroller of the SSD disk.
Repairing SSD drives is a very labor-intensive and long process, even compared to restoring conventional flash drives, where the work is also not easy. Finding and eliminating XOR transformations, finding out the sector architecture and page size of data blocks, finding the location of these blocks in banks, combining the results, finding algorithms for constructing translation tables using which the SSD controller formed a logical sequence of sectors in the final presentation to the user - all this is not an easy task .
And if we take into account the total number of chips in a modern SSD drive, which automatically repeatedly increases the number of possible options for action at each stage of collecting the final dump, then it becomes clear that in order to carry out the service, SSD repair or recovery from a broken SSD that is not detected in the data system requires an individual approach and availability of specialized tools and knowledge.
I draw your attention again!!! Repairing SSDs and HDDs, due to the nature of the technical process, implies the complete and irreversible destruction of user information. Do not confuse the concepts of “repair” and “information recovery.” These are directly opposite activities. If you need to restore data from a broken disk, then formulate your wish like this
Citizens often ask a logical question: what if I We also need data from a broken hard drive and its repair, what to do? The answer is simple: when an engineer is faced with such a task, the information is first recovered from the disk, and only then the disk is repaired.
When handing over your drive for service, it is advisable that the drive be packed in a special plastic container.
Be more specific about the essence of the drive malfunction (it is not detected by the BIOS, hangs, disappears from the system, slows down, etc.)
Once again: Particular attention should be paid to the fact that even diagnostics to determine the maintainability of the drive implies a loss of information in the work area, so it is necessary to clarify whether the information contained on the drive is valuable to you and whether it is necessary to save it.
Information was taken from http://www.hardmaster.info/repair/hdd.html
At the beginning there were errors. You download the movie, copy it, and then it may not be copied to the external drive.
10 - 15 minutes at a speed of 0.7 Kb / s and in the end 3-4 percent. Browsing with freezes.
All this, in my opinion, was the first sign that the ssd drive would soon end.
And then the computer simply wouldn't boot.
The BIOS contained information about only one hard drive.
What to do in such a situation.
I. If the solid-state drive is not detected, then it is better not to touch it.
Experts may be able to get the information, but I don’t see any point in restoring the ssd as a flash drive, since the warranty is still valid.
II. The hard drive is in trouble. Since there are usually personal and important files there, they need to be saved on another drive.
The hard drive itself may have to be formatted, since mine was dynamic and the system identified the screw as “foreign”.
III. After backing up all files and preparing the hard drive, you can begin installing the system.
Let's start with how to save all documents, photos and videos if the operating system is no longer on the computer.
How to save data on your hard drive
1. Create a bootable USB flash drive with Windows PE.
For this operation we need a working computer or laptop, the UltraISO program and an image.
1.1. After installing UltraISO and double-clicking on the image file, select “trial period” to open the image.
(Picture 1)
1.2. In the UltraISO program window that opens, click “Boot / Burn hard disk image.”
(Figure 2)
1.3. Select the device to which the contents of the image will be written and click “Burn”.
(Figure 3)
After recording, remove the flash drive.
2. We boot from a flash drive on a computer without an operating system.
While the computer is booting, press the del button all the time until we see the BIOS.
In my case it is uefi bios.
2.1. In the BIOS, select the device as shown in the figure.
Then press the F10 button, save and exit.
|
(Figure 4) |
(Figure 5)
3. Let's deal with the hard drive.
3.1. We import the hard drive so that you can see it by opening “My Computer”.
In my case, the hard drive was recognized as foreign and dynamic.
Even if it is foreign, first you need to import it using the “DISK MANAGEMENT” utility, which is found in every operating system and even in PE.
You can find it on your computer at “Control Panel / System and Security / Creating and formatting hard drive partitions”, and in PE by clicking on the “Start” button.
(Figure 6)
3.2. We copy all the information from the hard drive to a remote hard drive, DVD or other flash drive, since to install the operating system we will have to destroy all data on all logical drives!
How to prepare a hard drive for system installation
Since the hard drive is dynamic, the operating system will not be installed on it.
Accordingly, after copying, you need to make the hard drive “Basic”.
4.1. Open the Disk Management utility and right-click to bring up the context menu.
In the context menu, select “Convert to basic disk”.
After conversion, all logical drives will be destroyed and you will need to create them again!
The figure shows the context menu and the “Convert to Basic Disk” option.
(Figure 7)
Click “yes”.
(Figure 8)
We get a hard drive without partitions.
(Figure 9)
4.2. By right-clicking, open the context menu and select “Create simple volume.”
Then call the context menu again and make the first volume active.
(Figure 10)
5. The hard drive is ready to install the operating system.
Conclusions.
Although the ssd drive was fast and the operating system loaded quickly, all the fuss with data recovery paid off.
It was surprising to me that additional difficulties might arise with installing the system on a dynamic disk.
Repair of flash drives at the client's site
Prepared equipment and software for field data recovery work. This service is now quite in demand. Mainly for privacy reasons. People want to be sure that media with sensitive (intimate, secret, worth a lot of dollars - underline as appropriate) data does not physically leave the office or apartment and remains at the complete disposal of the owner.
The client is always right, and I am ready to perform repairs in front of him and on his computer. I don’t specifically bring a laptop so as not to plant a seed of doubt. Although this makes the work much more difficult. After all, the platform on which you have to work can be anything - from the ancient Windows 98 to Windows 7 or one of the representatives of the Linux family.
Of course, you can’t do without a programmer, a hair dryer and soldering accessories. The same with a multimeter, a set of running parts and laces. Everything is of high quality to ensure the result. There are the necessary optics (several magnifying glasses plus a pocket 40x microscope) and light, and technical fluids, where would we be without them - the contacts have to be cleaned regularly.
One of the first trips was to the then new product - a flash drive with a built-in fingerprint scanner. The client thought that this would give him impenetrable protection. Alas, the built-in utility for checking “fingers” froze after a month, burying two gigabytes of data. I remember fiddling with this for a long time
But the software and documentation are most important, because their selection is very specific. There are technological utilities from various manufacturers, in many versions totaling over 400, and a datasheet for the main controllers, and a database of memory chips, and a description of previous attempts (materialized experience, so to speak), and various auxiliary programs. A total of eight gigabytes, just enough for a decent flash drive or two DVDs. This entire set, plus the ability to use it, is the property of a repairman.
⇡ Flash drives are flying...
Every week a Transcend JetFlash V60 with a capacity of 16 GB is brought in for repair. This model is quite popular due to its compactness and low price, but its reliability leaves much to be desired. The batch was unsuccessful, or something, but after three or four months of operation, the flash drives are closed for writing - it is impossible to either create or edit the file, formatting also does not work.
This usually happens due to memory defects: if they grow, the controller blocks the write to prevent further damage (due to its design, flash memory is damaged mainly when writing). Low-level formatting restores functionality, however, at the cost of reducing the usable capacity by 200-600 KB. Several defective blocks are excluded from addressing.
Moral: when looking for a flash drive, look for reviews on the Internet. It happens that two neighboring models in a line differ noticeably in reliability. There is no need to dig into the reasons, just take a less capricious option, even if you don’t like it.
⇡ How important it is to be friends with your mother
They brought a computer and an 8 GB Kingston flash drive with an interesting problem - this flash drive works on other computers, but it doesn’t want to be friends with one of them. Reading goes fine, but as soon as you try to write something down, the writing speed drops almost to zero, the flash drive freezes, and then disappears from the list of devices. With other drives everything is fine. Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3.
It seems that the timing diagrams of the Kingston controller and the southbridge do not match.
What to do? You can switch the USB host to 1.1 mode through the BIOS, but then the speed will not suit anyone. It is more profitable to carry out low-level formatting of a flash drive, increasing the access time to cells from 50 to 66 ns. After this operation, performance dropped, but only slightly, and the drive became noticeably more stable.
⇡ Expensive complications
The client brought an expensive Sony Vaio Z laptop. On the phone, he muttered inaudibly about a lost disk and categorically did not want to let go of his computer (he is the director of a raw materials company, and such people, as well as lawyers, are painfully suspicious). On site, it turned out that the device contains a 120 GB SSD, and it cannot be removed: the mounting screws are sealed with warranty stickers, and the warranty is still valid (the laptop was purchased six months ago). Here's an ambush from Aunt Sonya. And I already prepared the SATA fittings for connection to the stand...
I had to launch the LiveCD, and of the three options I had, only one worked, LamygoBoot - that’s what new hardware means. The SSD turned out to be somewhat outdated and did not give SMART any value. There are already dips in the speed graph, which means the wear of the flash memory is progressing. The proven R-Studio recovery program worked with an SSD only slightly less than with a traditional disk of the same capacity (about an hour and a half).
SSD with two interfaces - USB 2.0 and SATA II. Can be used both as an internal and external device (the latter is especially useful for laptops)
I extracted a huge number of files and recorded them on an external drive. The main problem is the 32 GB SDHC card inserted into the built-in card reader. The director drove her head and shoulders, recording 52,000 (!) working and archival files over several years. The total volume recorded is 24 GB. Yes, not everyone can do this. Moreover, the main files are neatly designed Excel tables, with dynamic graphics and much more.
The owner firmly believed that the card would not fail, despite the fact that he did not remove it from the slot (it is important to him that the edge does not stick out, and in case of force majeure it is easy to hide, I was embarrassed to ask where). I didn’t make backup copies - I didn’t know what was needed, and my system administrator didn’t insist ( attention, attention, professional incompetence has been detected!).
In the end, the card (a mediocre model from Transcend), as expected, failed. As always - at the most inopportune moment. Now there is no access to the data, you will need to take a physical dump and assemble the file system. The work is painstaking, something like putting together a mosaic of eight million pieces.
Unsoldering the memory chip from the SD card. The peculiarity of these drives is that the board is as thick as a sheet of paper; you must be extremely careful when working
Moral of the story: Don't keep all your years' worth of work on one weak card. Well, it is not intended for this, its life program is to take photographs during serial shooting on a SLR camera, then transfer all the content to a computer and format it with ease. All! Therefore, even if you wake up at night from nightmares in the style of “OBEP, let’s start a mask show!”, you still need to make backup copies.
⇡ Weak link
They brought another flash drive with the missing “most necessary” file. If you constantly edit the same file day after day, sooner or later it will “go bad.” It is enough for the power supply to become weak (for example, from connecting other USB devices) or for the controller to fail.
When a certain area is repeatedly rewritten, the wear of the involved cells increases, and to level it out, a procedure for rebuilding the translator is launched, which sometimes takes a noticeable amount of time (this does not appear externally at all - the activity LED does not light up). At this point, the data is very vulnerable. The controller firmware does not provide any protection mechanisms, unlike hard drives and even SSDs.
In this case, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t restore the xls file. The owner will have to type it again using paper documents. He will probably spend more than a day instead of ten seconds creating a backup copy.
⇡ How not to handle memory cards
The miniSD card was placed in the camera through an adapter; it was filled with frames while on vacation, and upon returning it was inserted into the card reader for reading. It looks like it was inserted incorrectly and the card is stuck. They pulled her out using force and sharp nail clippers.
This did not end well: the card case fell apart (miniSD has a very thin one), and the internal tracks on the board, which were as thick as a sheet of paper, were torn. After this, there was nothing left to do but give the fragments of the card to a specialist to extract the data.
The owner found some kind of “jack-of-all-trades”. After two weeks of suffering, he couldn’t find anything better than to unsolder the memory chip from the card and put it on the board of the first flash drive he came across. Of course, with a completely different controller, this did not help, and, as it turned out later, it did a lot of harm. They brought me the chip itself on someone else’s flash drive and half the fragments of the card body with the controller completely demolished. And this is important: by marking the latter, the file system assembly algorithm is determined.
Well, I considered the dump, I tried 4 assembly options. No FAT tables were found in all of them, although some JPEGs were visible. It turned out that someone else's controller simply reset the place where the FAT was located. If questionable experiments had not been carried out, all the images would have been restored. And so we managed to save less than half, and even twenty percent in varying degrees of cutting.
Moral: rarely move cards from the camera (player, navigator, etc.) to the card reader and back. It is safer to connect the gadget itself to the PC. Not only are mechanical failures possible, cards are often damaged by static, especially formats with open contacts are prone to this. Adapters (microSD-miniSD-SD) only complicate matters, adding another point of failure.
⇡ Non-standard form factor as a risk factor
We brought a PQI Card Drive U510 flash drive for repair. This is a flat aluminum plate in the format of a business card, from which a USB connector comes out on a flexible cable, and there is also an activity indicator on it. It was this cable that failed: a couple of tracks were frayed. It is not easy to restore a 7 mm wide cable; it is even more difficult to ensure its long life after repair. But there is nothing to replace it with - the part is non-standard. In general, the expensive drive was thrown away. To get the necessary data (as usual, there is an archive on a flash drive for two years without backups), I unsoldered the memory chips and counted the dumps. The design added problems here too: the board is glued with its entire surface to the aluminum cover. This is good for work (the heat dissipation is ideal), but bad for repairs - desoldering the chips is difficult. I had to take a powerful industrial hair dryer and heat it twice as long as usual, which significantly increases the risk of data damage. Indeed, there were a lot of errors on one of the two chips (however, memory is now completely error-free). Some files were not completely restored, but the client was satisfied.
The flash drive is in disassembled condition. A broken cable is visible
Only such a hefty hairdryer was able to unsolder the chips
Moral: keep it simple. Flash drives with an elaborate design are almost always less reliable and repairable than standard “whistles” and “sticks”. If the shaped cap gets lost or some part gets jammed (for example, a retractable connector), it’s not so bad. But in this case, the non-standard form factor caused the destruction of the drive and led to significant losses for the client (time, data, money). In the end, I still bought a regular flash drive. Leave the exotic ones for gifts (especially for enemies), and work with standard media, and of reasonable capacity. I have already explained why excess capacity is harmful. Greed—it destroys many people.
⇡ Typical faults
All flash drives (USB drives, memory cards and SSDs) are designed the same way, and their faults are similar. Let's look at the main causes of failure and measures to restore data in each case.
- Damage to the translator
Any modern flash drive has a translation system that shuffles data blocks in memory. Attached to each block is a translation table and a number of markers (in particular, a counter for the number of records in the block); they are updated simultaneously with the data being written. The serviceability of these service fields is critical for user access to data.And here we touch on the weak point of flash technologies. To change even one byte in flash memory, you need to read into the buffer, change (that same byte), erase and write the entire block. Any failure during recording (poor contact in a loose connector, unstable power supply, defective cells on the flash drive itself, etc.) can lead to a situation where the block did not have time to be recorded along with its markers and translation table.
My away gentleman's set. The black flash drive (on the right) was purchased recently (the leader in speed in its class), all the others are of advanced age, but do not complain about their health
In this case, the integrity of the translator is violated, and correct memory addressing is lost. This blocks the user’s access to it, which externally looks like a message like “Insert the disk into the drive”, “Device not recognized”, freeze, etc. From the point of view of the flash drive controller, this malfunction is purely software and can be cured by erasing the entire amount of memory and creating a new translator.
For this purpose, technological utilities are used in factories for the initial firmware of flash drives; many of them can be found, for example, on flashboot.ru. The term “firmware” is not entirely accurate, since the true firmware of a flash drive (that same firmware) is not located on the flash memory chips, but in the controller and is installed during its manufacture. Cases of firmware corruption with a working controller are extremely rare, and they can be ignored. Creating a new translator is more correctly called low-level formatting.
A “double-barreled” flash drive with two interfaces is fast, but expensive. With the advent of USB 3.0, the relevance of such solutions is fading
Obviously, such a procedure is detrimental to data, although there have been reports of cases where data on a flash drive was saved when formatting was interrupted.
However, there is no system in these messages, and they should not be taken into account. The most correct way to recover data in such cases is to unsolder the memory chips, read them on the programmer and add the resulting dumps into the required data. The last stage can be very non-trivial and lengthy.
- Hardware faults
This includes burnt controllers and stabilizers, broken connectors, torn current-carrying tracks on the board, cracked resistors and filters, dead crystals, etc.
Characteristic symptoms - the flash drive does not show signs of life when connected, or gets very hot, so that after a few seconds your hand can’t stand it.
If the controller is working properly, repair is quite possible by replacing parts and restoring contacts. The data remains in place. In other cases (and they are the majority), the data recovery technology is the same as described above.Previously, when this technology did not yet exist, many repairmen tried to resolder a burnt-out controller. It was possible to recover data in no more than 20% of cases, so this approach was abandoned. The reason is the difference in firmware in different versions of controllers and difficulties in obtaining the required version. In fact, for the success of the work, it was necessary to find a donor flash drive not only of the same model, but also from the same batch.
- Logic faults
The flash drive is working properly, is recognized and allows access according to logic, but the file system is damaged (it appears, for example, empty or unformatted). The main method of data recovery is to copy the entire flash memory into an image file and parse it using recovery programs. There are now a huge number of the latter, both paid and free; the choice of utility is determined by the experience and preferences of the repairman. A number of free utilities are reviewed in a review on 3DNews. Here (and only here) remote assistance is possible - from sending an image to launching a recovery agent that transfers the results to a remote computer.It is perhaps worth saying a few words about typical failures during data recovery.
- Mechanical damage to the memory chip
An unnoticeable crack is enough to break the thinnest conductors connecting the crystal to the terminals. Then there is nothing to catch. Fortunately, the chip is protected by the case, as well as the board itself, and it is located far from the USB connector - the most vulnerable spot. So chip damage is quite rare.
However, with strong impacts problems cannot be avoided. In my experience, there was an SD memory card that did not survive a car accident (the card was in the camera, and the device was in the glove compartment of the crashed car). The camera, of course, is in the trash. The card was bent by a screw, and the chip crumbled when trying to unsolder it. - Data encoding on the chip that could not be solved. This happened at an early stage, when there was little experience and statistics, and the most exotic controllers came across. Now there is no such obstacle: almost all encoding schemes have been dismantled, and the variety of controllers has decreased.
- Unsolved problem - hardware encryption(AES-128 and AES-256 standards).
For this purpose, special controllers are used; just a couple of years ago they were quite expensive and slow, they were installed in a few models of flash drives (Kingston Security Edition, etc.). Now the price has dropped sharply, the operating speed has increased, and an on-the-fly encrypting controller is included in many models (with a price, however, still above average). Encrypted data from the chip cannot be read. The key is hardwired into the controller; removing it even from a working chip is a problem. And they mostly bring them burnt. - Finally, sometimes The flash drive spoils itself. NAND flash memory has a bulk erase operation (typically 128 KB) that occurs in milliseconds. As a result of a power failure, an error in the operation of the translator, or other reasons, an erase signal may be sent to the memory, and then the data is over. The block will consist of FF bytes (the erased cell acquires the value of a logical one). Blocks in the area of file system tables (FAT) are especially often affected. Work with them is carried out most actively; FAT is updated every time any of the files on the flash drive are changed. And since people sometimes record thousands of files and edit them intensively, at some point the translator can’t handle it. The result is logical damage to the file system that can no longer be repaired. After all, the overwritten 128 KB is a lot for FAT. It’s especially annoying when tightly coupled databases like 1C collapse. Lost a couple of files out of a hundred, and hello.
Here, by the way, there is a significant difference with hard drives. Recording on magnetic plates occurs, although very quickly, but strictly sequentially, so spontaneous overwriting of large fragments practically does not occur. The only exception is the Security Erase command, which erases the entire user area of the disk without transferring it over the interface. But it is not used in regular (non-repair) software.
⇡ Counterfeits attack
Counterfeits are a big and long-standing problem in the world of flash drives. They became possible thanks to the extreme simplicity of the design of a typical flash drive: a controller, a dozen wiring parts, a couple of memory chips. All this is installed on a board measuring 3-4 cm, equipped with a USB connector and housed in a suitable case. The labeling and packaging, which are almost perfectly similar to the original, is also not a problem.
Pseudo-flash drives can be produced almost in makeshift conditions, which is what numerous Chinese (and other) scammers do. In addition, there is also a “third shift” in legal production. Night “drummers” use cheap scrap parts, placing them in original cases and providing them with branded packaging. The capacity of such a flash drive corresponds to the declared one, at first it even works, but defects quickly appear, the recorded files are spoiled, and then the controller is completely blocked, and the drive can be thrown away.
The point, of course, is not about lost money (not that much, although it is not superfluous), but about missing data. In defective chips, the cells “leak”, i.e. lose charge very quickly - recorded files become unreadable after a few days, or even hours. Let me remind you that normal flash memory should retain information for 10 years.
You can find out the location of defective areas and isolate them using a technological utility, unique for each controller model. I think that it is unlikely that any ordinary user will spend time on this. Those who are meticulous will find utilities and instructions on thematic sites and forums.
There are a lot of fakes in the memory card segment, especially those that are more expensive. This is especially true for the Memory Stick format produced by Sony: “non-original” cards occupy, according to estimates, up to half of our market. They are usually functional, but the speed and resource are noticeably lower than the original. In addition, cards may not be recognized in all devices (PDAs and game consoles are capricious; they used to even advise distinguishing fakes by the behavior of the card on the latter). It is possible to navigate the intricacies of packaging and labeling, but it is difficult: the qualifications of counterfeiters have grown so much that their products sometimes look better than the original. Thus, markings on the body can be applied with a laser, while Sony traditionally uses paint.
Fake Memory Stick Pro. It is recognized on the computer, but it never works on any mobile device (PDA or PSP). Pay attention to the wear and corrosion of the contacts: it looks like the gold plating is also fake
If we return to the main array of fakes, then their essence is a sharp increase in capacity, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more. It is clear that this allows you to make excess profits, even if the “product” is sold at half the regular price. A 2-4 GB flash drive is flashed using a technological utility (stolen, by the way, from a legal manufacturer) to a capacity of 16-32 GB, or even higher. There are no restrictions here: what you write in the INI file of the utility is what will be issued in response to a request from the operating system.
As you know, the task of any fraud is to prevent the deception from being revealed at the time of payment (and until the fraudster is removed to a safe distance from the disappointed client). In this case, this is supported by the property of flashed flash drives that writing to fictitious addresses exceeding the real capacity occurs apparently normally and without errors. This is exactly what sellers demonstrate by uploading large films or simply archives of considerable size into a fake flash drive. In reality, of course, there is no record, and the subsequent reading of the data returns only zeros. All files located outside the actual capacity of the flash drive will be “broken.” With a high probability, the flash drive itself will no longer be recognized. But the unlucky buyer will understand this much later...
I advise buyers to be careful, not to purchase flash drives from dubious places or from not very reliable sellers on eBay, and also to save receipts, warranty documents and packaging. At the first sign of problems, stop using the drive and replace it under warranty. I hope you don’t have to face a situation where a crafty seller interprets a “lifetime warranty” as a guarantee for the time until the first failure of the drive.
Restless scammers are increasingly offering not only USB flash drives on steroids, but also memory cards. Making the latter is technologically more difficult (reflashing requires special equipment), but, apparently, the profit is greater. Cards of the most popular SDHC/microSDHC format today are in great demand; they are used in a huge number of gadgets - from players and smartphones to video cameras and e-readers. So there are no problems with sales.
Most often, of course, expensive 32 and 64 GB cards are counterfeited. In addition to firmware for large capacity, counterfeiters also cheat with performance. High-speed models (class 6 and higher) with the same capacity are noticeably more expensive, so a banal relabeling to a higher class in itself gives a good gain. Not everyone will make a claim on a brake card, so the sale of such counterfeits is also relatively safe. In addition, you can always refer to unsuitable equipment, bad cables, etc. That’s why on eBay and other flea markets such “good” is a dime a dozen.
But let's get back to flash drives. New on the counterfeit market are models with enormous capacity, 256 GB and even 2 TB, at an absurdly low price. So, real 256 GB flash drives cost at least 15,000 rubles. and are quite rare to find on sale. Counterfeits, which look no different in appearance, are offered en masse for around a thousand.
The flash drive body is quite thick to accommodate all the memory chips. On a fake it is simply filled with air
Relying, as always, on the greed and laziness of buyers. Just look at the prices for flash memory to understand: chips of the required capacity alone will cost at least $50 (and this is at exchange prices, where they sell by the carload), not counting everything else. Some sellers, however, are already ashamed. Here is an advertisement from one of the auctions, at least honest:
« Selling flash drive256 GB Flash Memory Drive!New, sealed. Inexpensive!
Of course, there is no 256 GB (a little less), the flash drive is made in China, but you can safely count on 8-32 GB. It may need to be formatted, but that's not a problem.
I don’t know what the actual capacity is, I’m selling it as is. Negotiable!
An even more egregious case is a flash drive of the most ordinary type, supposedly with a capacity of 2 TB and a price of almost 4,000 rubles. Is this real? 32 memory chips of 64 GB each (the maximum available today) will definitely not fit into a standard case. The power consumption of such a kit is also quite large; power from the USB port (500 mA) is hardly enough.
In short, making a two-terabyte flash drive is unrealistic today. Terabyte internal SSDs in the format of a full-size PCI card (otherwise it would be impossible to fit all the chips) appeared quite recently and at a very inhumane price. There is no need to talk about an external solid-state drive of such capacity yet.
This is what a super fake looks like. Does anyone believe the numbers on the case?
And this is how it is determined in the computer. The thirteen-digit capacity is the fruit of the skill of Chinese-Israeli craftsmen (on the packaging the manufacturer is simply indicated: Israel)
So we have an extremely blatant fake. It would be interesting to know its real capacity (tera-flash drives have not yet reached Moscow; they all settle in Siberia). I'm guessing it's 32GB or so. This is a fairly large figure for an external drive, so the unlucky buyer will not go beyond its boundaries immediately. And then the corruption of files, the collapse of the file system and other joys will begin.
⇡ MLC on the march
All modern flash drives use memory chips built using MLC technology. Each cell stores 2 or even 3 bits of data (in the latter case, the technology is sometimes called TLC), in contrast to the previously used SLC memory with single-bit packaging. It is clear that such a thin structure is not very stable. The number of erase-write cycles in an MLC cell does not exceed 10-30 thousand, but in reality it is 2-3 times less (the SLC resource reached 100-300 thousand cycles).
Moreover, the storage time of recorded information decreases exponentially depending on the type of recording it is. Passports are guaranteed for 10 years only for a “fresh” cell. The exponent index is not a standardized thing; it strongly depends on the purity of the source materials, the technological process of chip manufacturing and, of course, the operating features. In general, it’s a lottery - it’s almost impossible to predict when files from a flash drive will stop being read. It happens that the cells “leak” after 2-3 months (degradation is 50 times, however).
In this sense, SLC chips with a guaranteed 100 thousand records per cell and a long shelf life win. However, their capacity does not suit many users. Indeed, with the same technological process and standard packaging, you can place only 2 GB on a chip and, accordingly, make an 8 GB flash drive in the usual design (4 chips on the board). There were attempts to release 16 GB models on eight chips, but they turned out to be bulky and expensive (about $200), were in little demand and were discontinued.
But everything is not so bad, we are witnesses to how sophisticated “software” (microprograms) overcomes the shortcomings of “silicon” (low resource and low performance of MLC memory). First of all, these are wear leveling algorithms used in modern controllers. They have advanced a lot lately, which allows MLC flash drives to last up to two years even with active use. It would be possible to provide an even greater resource, but, apparently, this is not necessary: no one has abolished obsolescence. All the same, in a year and a half, the drive will be replaced by an attractive new product.
As for the long time required by MLC chips for rewriting, current flash drives use two- or four-channel technology, when recording is performed simultaneously in 2 or 4 blocks (higher-speed SSDs have up to ten channels). Together with various caching disciplines, this brings the streaming write speed to 24 MB/s - just like the best SLC flash drives. Serious slowdown is observed only when writing randomly to widely spaced blocks, but how often does this occur in practice?
⇡ Murphy's Law for SSDs
Finally, a few words about solid-state drives, which use a unique memory management system. A dynamically reconfigured translator (in order to level out wear and increase recording speed) actually prevents confidential data from being reliably erased. On the other hand, the controller tries everything that can be cleared to form previously erased blocks, so it may not be possible to restore a recently deleted file. In short, if you want to recover deleted data, then you cannot do this. If you want to destroy them, then you cannot do that either. This is such a “Murphy’s law” for storing data on an SSD. It would seem that reliably destroying data is not a problem: you delete files, and then copy incompressible content like MPEG files to all the free space (this is a measure against SandForce-level controllers that compress on the fly), and that’s it. However, SSDs always have a capacity reserve of 20-30%, and the controller regularly rebuilds the translator to level out the wear of the blocks. It may turn out that some physical areas have already been excluded from addressing, and old versions of files remain in them.
And they cannot be erased by any copying - after all, logically there is no access to the files. But if you count the chips on the programmer, then everything rises perfectly. It turns out that a used SSD stores its entire backstory, and certain people in certain circumstances may be interested in it.
This problem is still far from being solved, except for such a radical remedy as a hammer. Therefore, selling used SSDs carries a certain risk. I note that buying them is not very wise: the flash memory resource may be running out, and finding out is not always easy (you need a computer with a diagnostic program). Therefore, it is better to take a new copy and keep the old ones under lock and key. From sin.
Every PC user sooner or later faces problems when it is necessary to correct errors that occur with the system. And it’s good if they didn’t affect personal data. It’s worse if you have to restore the SSD drive. What is needed for this?
Device
Before you figure out how to recover data from a solid-state drive, it’s worth understanding what it is. SSD is a drive that is installed in a computer system. It is often compared to a hard drive because both devices have the same tasks. But there is a significant difference.
A solid state drive is a very fast drive that can handle work several times faster than a hard drive. This is caused by a difference in design.
Built on magnetic disks and a read head, a solid-state drive works like a flash drive and is based on microchips.
At the moment, SSDs are just gaining popularity. They are often purchased in pairs with hard drives and an operating system is installed on them for quick loading. Because SSDs are prohibitively expensive, HDDs cannot completely replace SSDs. Although server stations and gaming systems can install several solid-state drives.
Drive problems
As mentioned, SSD is popular due to its high speed. But, besides this, it is also considered a reliable device. This is due to the fact that the drive's design does not have moving parts, so it does not suffer from minor damage that the hard drive may not tolerate.
But an SSD can definitely be attacked by viruses and user errors. All this affects the integrity of personal data. If certain files are deleted, it will not be easy to recover them. It’s more difficult with data after formatting. But restoring an SSD is possible.
What are the chances?
It’s worth saying right away that data recovery from an SSD drive is somewhat different from the process that is necessary in the case of a hard drive. Unfortunately, there are situations that make it impossible to recover lost documents.
But in most cases, it is possible to return files. The user will have to select the appropriate program and follow the instructions.
Special teams
The question of whether the SSD drive will be restored worries many people. It’s definitely not easy to answer, since there are a couple of nuances that can affect the result.
A distinctive feature of the drive is the presence of a specific command that SSDs have. TRIM is responsible for ensuring that all data that has been deleted from the disk is actually destroyed. The SSD completely erases the files from the data blocks.
This command works very simply. When a user deletes documents, it signals that the files should be destroyed rather than stored in special blocks.
But there is one point here: of course, the documents will not be deleted immediately. The device will notify the user that the files have been deleted, but the block will be cleared a little later. Therefore, there is a chance to quickly return the data.
All popular manufacturers of solid-state drives are trying to create universal devices that differ from each other only in archive volume. All drives have the same speed, so the TRIM command will be executed 100%.
What to do?
If a command like this exists, is it possible to recover an SSD drive? In reality, little will happen. For example, some drives do not support the command to completely delete files, so any program can handle the recovery. Also, TRIM may not work on a particular operating system. There may be difficulties with the interface or motherboard. USB and FireWire protocols do not support the command.
Formatted drives
In this case, recovering SSD disk files is even more difficult. As you know, there is a complete and quick formatting of disks. Thanks to this function, you can completely clear data from the drive.
Full formatting completely destroys data, while quick formatting works with information partition tables. Therefore, any popular recovery program could handle the second type of deletion. But later the technology of the solid-state drive changed. Now it will be difficult to cope with quick formatting, let alone full formatting.
This state of affairs is again associated with the TRIM command. When the user selects formatting, it automatically triggers a complete data deletion. And the delay between activating TRIM and destroying documents from the disk is practically non-existent.
Disk failure
Why do you need SSD recovery? The hard drive may be corrupted by the system or damaged. The device may have become unreadable and the OS cannot detect it. In this case, returning personal data will be very simple. All you need to do is select the right software and restore the files.
This is because the drive cannot enable TRIM. Due to the fact that the command has not been run, files from the blocks will not be deleted. Accordingly, they will be easy to restore.
Recovery instructions
First you have to find a good program. Recovering an SSD drive is not easy. As with a flash drive, the user will have to try several programs at once. Therefore, you first need to install a couple of utility options.
After this you will have to connect the SSD. Many users advise using the USB interface rather than the SATA interface for this. This is due to the fact that the “native” port can activate the TRIM command, and accordingly, the files will be permanently deleted.
If you connect the drive via USB, deletion will not be activated, which means that the documents will remain safe.
Once the device is connected, you can launch the program. Whatever the utility, they all have a similar interface. You just need to select the drive you want to restore. After this, the user must start diagnostics, and then the recovery process itself.
results
When the program collects all the information, a table will appear showing all the lost data. Some programs use certain markings. If the file can be recovered and saved on a PC, there will be a green check mark opposite it. If it is damaged and its restoration is in doubt, there will be a yellow checkmark opposite. Red color indicates that the files have been severely “destroyed” and there are only their remains. Accordingly, it will be impossible to “reincarnate” such data.
Programs
There are a large number of programs for data recovery from a solid-state drive. For example, you can use Magic Partition Recovery. The utility can cope with deleted partitions and bad sectors.
The program works with many file formats. It can scan the drive in a short time and then generate a report. There is also an in-depth analysis of SSDs. In this case, the utility works with the contents of files without using the file table.
Magic Uneraser is another document recovery program. It differs only in interface from the previous version. Works with all existing media file formats. Quickly scans the drive and also collects a report on the recovered data. The utility is compatible with hard drives, solid-state drives, memory cards and flash drives.
Repair
Speaking about restoring the SSD disk controller, it is worth mentioning physical damage to the device. If for some reason the drive has broken down, you shouldn’t throw it away right away. Many experts say that it is quite possible to repair it. The question here is different: does the user have the necessary tools and skills?
In this case, it is necessary to know the reading range, memory types, and standard errors. Specialists carefully inspect the device, disconnect the chips, select a mount and scan the board.
Of course, an ordinary user will not be able to perform such operations. To do this, you need to understand the drive structure, as well as have the appropriate testing programs and repair tools.