JoeWras
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2012
- Messages
- 11,702
This post is coming to you from a complete reinstall. 
I thought I'd give you a bit of my experience of what happens with a solid state drive failure, mostly so people can add responses about how diligent they are in backup and shame the rest of us into backing up better. 
Also interesting is that my SSD is soldered down on the board, an emerging common strategy by all vendors, including Apple. My install is Windows 10 so my story revolves around recovering from that. Still, when researching this, I saw a lot of MacBook people were complaining about their soldered down SSD, so just be aware no matter what you have. Here it goes...
My four year old computer was acting strange last month. So what did I do? Ignore it. Great move, Joe...
Anyway, I literally watched my files melt away before my eyes as applications slowly started talking back to me in strange ways with odd dialogs and errors. It was in interesting experience. This is very different than DRAM errors which typically cause a hard reset. Nope, the computer was limping. Actually, it was limping along amazingly well, recovering from many errors. This is a Windows 10 install.
My FIRST symptom was my folders, as shown in file manager, had little blue arrows appear. I looked this up and it said it was automatic compression since my disk was getting full. This didn't completely surprise me since I was pretty full, but... In retrospect, it was the disk system massively trying to reorganize itself due to errors.
My SECOND symptom was frequent windows manager resets. I'd see the screen icons kind of go blank for a second, then come back. This is not normal and if you see this you should find out why. I lived with it for a few weeks with increasing frequency.
My THIRD symptom was applications that just acted really weird. For instance, my password manager would refuse to open the default file. I had to point to it each time. Other apps started throwing other strange errors, all in the name of trying to do something, I guess.
After this, I started to get worried that I may have been ransom-wared or something. My gut was to first check the Windows system log. Woah! Lots of red exclamations with "I/O Error" or "Disk System Error". So, yeah, I knew it was bad. I backed out of my log check and tried to copy off the few files I knew were not backed up, but sadly they were "gone."
So, I rebooted. Uh oh, the screen I got was some low level Windows recovery. Attempting their suggestions resulted in more errors.
In the dark ages, what I would do at this time was pull out the drive and insert it somewhere else. Normally, I could limp along and get out some of the files. This isn't going to happen with a soldered down SSD! So, lesson learned. Back up more.
I could have created a bootable USB and tried copying more, but I decided that this "fire" would renew me, so I let it burn. I went into BIOS and changed the boot order to a second plugged in (removable) SSD, and started reinstall. (After reinstall, I used BIOS to activate the soldered SSD and any attempts at access with low level tools resulted in massive I/O errors, so it is a complete loss.)
My most crucial files (Quicken) are backed up every day. I thought I just lost a few other files. When the dust settled, I realized I lost more than expected, but guess what? It was almost a free feeling. I was starting with a clean slate of sorts, throwing away the debris of the last few months. There's a part of me that really wants to start tossing files on a regular basis. It really was a strange, but freeing, experience to throw away a lot of trivial files.
The Reinstall:
For Windows 10, not too bad. You just go to their download site and cut a USB or DVD and reload. Of course I had to do this on a separate computer. They keep the authorization in their database somewhere, so you don't even have to deal with that when you do reinstall.
What was a pain was Quicken. We have threads on this and Quicken's forcing people to subscription. I still have a valid 2016 version. Reinstall didn't work, however. It would not let me open my file. A little searching shows that once you install, you have to download two large patches from Quicken and apply them in sequence! All part of their split from Intuit and attempt to eventually shut out the non-subscriber customers. None of this was obvious, of course. I think I said more than a few swear words through the process.
Upshot:
- Backup. For crucial data (Quicken, for example) backup on each use to a removable media. I back my to a USB button drive. Saved me big time!
- Don't ignore weirdness.
- Read your system log from time to time (Windows or Apple) and make sure nothing bad is brewing.
- Soldered down SSDs are the future and remove some flexibility in data recovery options.
- A failing SSD may limp along for quite a while because the software attempts to work around the errors for as long as it can. The error recovery and file healing was actually pretty darn good until it became massive.
I thought I'd give you a bit of my experience of what happens with a solid state drive failure, mostly so people can add responses about how diligent they are in backup and shame the rest of us into backing up better. Also interesting is that my SSD is soldered down on the board, an emerging common strategy by all vendors, including Apple. My install is Windows 10 so my story revolves around recovering from that. Still, when researching this, I saw a lot of MacBook people were complaining about their soldered down SSD, so just be aware no matter what you have. Here it goes...My four year old computer was acting strange last month. So what did I do? Ignore it. Great move, Joe...
Anyway, I literally watched my files melt away before my eyes as applications slowly started talking back to me in strange ways with odd dialogs and errors. It was in interesting experience. This is very different than DRAM errors which typically cause a hard reset. Nope, the computer was limping. Actually, it was limping along amazingly well, recovering from many errors. This is a Windows 10 install.
My FIRST symptom was my folders, as shown in file manager, had little blue arrows appear. I looked this up and it said it was automatic compression since my disk was getting full. This didn't completely surprise me since I was pretty full, but... In retrospect, it was the disk system massively trying to reorganize itself due to errors.
My SECOND symptom was frequent windows manager resets. I'd see the screen icons kind of go blank for a second, then come back. This is not normal and if you see this you should find out why. I lived with it for a few weeks with increasing frequency.
My THIRD symptom was applications that just acted really weird. For instance, my password manager would refuse to open the default file. I had to point to it each time. Other apps started throwing other strange errors, all in the name of trying to do something, I guess.
After this, I started to get worried that I may have been ransom-wared or something. My gut was to first check the Windows system log. Woah! Lots of red exclamations with "I/O Error" or "Disk System Error". So, yeah, I knew it was bad. I backed out of my log check and tried to copy off the few files I knew were not backed up, but sadly they were "gone."
So, I rebooted. Uh oh, the screen I got was some low level Windows recovery. Attempting their suggestions resulted in more errors.
In the dark ages, what I would do at this time was pull out the drive and insert it somewhere else. Normally, I could limp along and get out some of the files. This isn't going to happen with a soldered down SSD! So, lesson learned. Back up more.
I could have created a bootable USB and tried copying more, but I decided that this "fire" would renew me, so I let it burn. I went into BIOS and changed the boot order to a second plugged in (removable) SSD, and started reinstall. (After reinstall, I used BIOS to activate the soldered SSD and any attempts at access with low level tools resulted in massive I/O errors, so it is a complete loss.)
My most crucial files (Quicken) are backed up every day. I thought I just lost a few other files. When the dust settled, I realized I lost more than expected, but guess what? It was almost a free feeling. I was starting with a clean slate of sorts, throwing away the debris of the last few months. There's a part of me that really wants to start tossing files on a regular basis. It really was a strange, but freeing, experience to throw away a lot of trivial files.
The Reinstall:
For Windows 10, not too bad. You just go to their download site and cut a USB or DVD and reload. Of course I had to do this on a separate computer. They keep the authorization in their database somewhere, so you don't even have to deal with that when you do reinstall.
What was a pain was Quicken. We have threads on this and Quicken's forcing people to subscription. I still have a valid 2016 version. Reinstall didn't work, however. It would not let me open my file. A little searching shows that once you install, you have to download two large patches from Quicken and apply them in sequence! All part of their split from Intuit and attempt to eventually shut out the non-subscriber customers. None of this was obvious, of course. I think I said more than a few swear words through the process.
Upshot:
- Backup. For crucial data (Quicken, for example) backup on each use to a removable media. I back my to a USB button drive. Saved me big time!
- Don't ignore weirdness.
- Read your system log from time to time (Windows or Apple) and make sure nothing bad is brewing.
- Soldered down SSDs are the future and remove some flexibility in data recovery options.
- A failing SSD may limp along for quite a while because the software attempts to work around the errors for as long as it can. The error recovery and file healing was actually pretty darn good until it became massive.
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) in the past. Others say "Who needs a backup? Don't have time for no backup?" 
