Gave Up on SSD

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Finally took the time and had husband put my Crucial SSD back into my PC. We unplugged the “C” drive and installed the SSD in its place. Changed the storage configuration to AHCI, made sure the drive now showed as Solid State, and did the Boot Priorities changes necessary. The PC booted up and worked for about 10 minutes and then every time I tried to do something in Windows, the PC froze up. I removed the drive and plugged the hard disk back in made the fixes in the BIOS necessary and PC is back working. I also noticed that of the 512GB, 300 of it was allocated to the primary partition and the recovery partition was 180GB. I saw that and checked the allocated space on my 1TB spinner and the entire drive had 900 GB as the primary partition and about 500MB as recovery partition. I don’t know the why of these numbers, but it was too much for me to figure out, so I just had the sucker pulled out of the tower.

But, my question is this. I reinstalled the WD 1TB hard drive and its working fine. My second storage drive, a 3TB WD black now shows up in disk management as “0” and the primary “C” drive as 1. Is this going to be a problem? Additionally, in the panel which shows the primary partition, next to “Healthy” in parenthesis it shows(System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) All these appeared after I had the SSD installed and it malfunctioned. None of these notations were there in the panel applicable to the hard disk before it was replaced by the SSD.

I looked in Event Viewer to make sure there were no hardware events for the WD hard drive and there aren’t. Should I concern myself with the two issues? Thanks so much.

Diane

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Freezing after a short time was a signature of W10 AU during the first weeks after AU was released for a lot of users, ensure that your W10 installer uses the versions from late September onwards.

Numbers used for the drives are mostly down to where they are connected on the motherboard, check in the BIOS/UEFI that your System/Windows drive is connected to the 0 channel, hopefully that’s the Intel chipset, and work up from there. Windows doesn’t necessarily use/number the drives in the same order though – the System drive will always be C:, no matter where it’s connected.

Once you get the drive order fixed, you might find that it won’t boot, the Active/Boot drive might not be where it was… booting again from an install/Recovery source, you should be able to make the needed changes automatically but a fixMBR and fixBoot should improve matters, I don’t do W10 (since the AU Release fiasco that caused the freeze on my test machine), so someone else should soon provide any details that may be different.

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Thanks for your response.

I never did install W10 AU and I’ve installed all the Windows updates so far that have been offered w/o problems. I don’t do the hardware on this system, so I’m embarrassed to say, I’m not sure what channel my System/Windows drive is connected to. It is the Intel chipset. I’m certain of that. Do I actually have to fix the drive order if it’s working? I’m just afraid if I start juggling drives around on the motherboard I’m going to screw it up big time.

The PC is homebuilt, so I don’t really know how the drives ended up in what connection, to tell the truth. It’s been this way since it was built and this is the first time I noticed the drive numbers were botched up.

Diane

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If it’s all working correctly, there’s no need to change anything physically – just try to work out where any potential failure/complication point might be should you have a minor catastrophe and make yourself familiar with the methods and tools needed to get it back up and running quickly (these things I do on auto pilot, it’s very difficult for me to make explicit instructions and recommendations as my train of thought is already over the horizon before I start typing = difficult to recall all the points in the correct order and get them into a readily understandable version of English etc. ).

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I just looked in the BIOS and it turns out that the “C” drive shows up on Channel 5 and Channel 0 has nothing detected. What will happen if I moved the drive around from 5 to 0 in the BIOS. I looked in my manual and I see where channel 0 is. I just don’t know if that’s where the drive was originally connected. I’ll have to have my husband open the PC again and look on the motherboard.

I presume that’s where we decided to put it, not knowing any better. If I like what I see, then I’ll move it around in the BIOS and see what happens. Thanks again

D.

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Changing the drives to fit what should be the logical sequence should be no problem, check that the BIOS/UEFI is still set to boot from the C: drive afterwards and then F10 to Save and Exit to begin the boot sequence.

The Active drive is actually the most important drive for successful boot up, no Active drive = no boot, your C: drive appears to have all attributes, so booting should be straightforward after a SATA port # change.

Edit: Wait, you can’t change port #’s from the BIOS, the BIOS only reports on what it detects installed. Any changes need to be done manually, shut down, open the case, find the C:, trace the SATA cable, disconnect it, find the #0 port, connect the C: drive cable to it, check connections. Try a test boot, enter the BIOS and check that the correct drive is selected as Boot drive.

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I suspect it’s your BIOS / AHCI setup that’s at issue.
Can you run the SSD without changing the BIOS?

cheers, Paul

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No, I can’t. I tried it several weeks ago and we just replaced the cables from “C” into the SSD, and booted up. The results were even worse than what I got yesterday. I had no keyboard, no mouse and never got past the desktop. We’re going to give it a go again. I think I read somewhere where others have had success just running it as IDE. In that we will be in the PC anyway, might as well give it a shot as IDE and just change the type of drive to solid state and make sure the boot priority was correct. BTW, the system disk was never on Channel 0, ever. We looked this AM. There’s nothing there. It’s location must have not been a problem all this time.

I don’t understand any of this however, because I first used the SSD when my PC was first built as the primary drive; “it called itself AHCI” and it ran flawlessly until I corrupted the thing going from Win8 to Win8.1. I lost patience with it after spending hours trying to get the PC to run and just took it out and thought I salvaged it….Later

D.

Addendum…to finish the saga. We gave one last try to get the solid state drive to work properly incl changing the BIOS setup/AHCI. The thing still crashed my system altho’ it did bootup quite nicely and quickly; when we changed AHCI, I got inaccessible hard drive error. Better than this though, when we moved the WD from its old channel to the 0 channel, I almost fainted when I got the inaccessible hard drive error for my “C” drive; then we couldn’t get into the BIOS because the keyboard stopped working and we didn’t know it. After we figured out that, I still had the inaccessible hard drive error and couldn’t get into the BIOS; then I got into Safe Mode, elevated command prompt and we took a shot at chkdsk and that worked so I’m back up and running with “C” as “0” and “D” as disk 1, but it certainly was a rough road getting there.

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I wonder if the SSD is not well. Have you run the manufacturer’s diags on it?
If it comes up OK, I’d try a clean install on the SSD with no other disks installed.

cheers, Paul

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I ran the Crucial diags on it when it first failed and it was okay. I quick formatted it like you’re supposed to and then cloned my hard drive to the SSD w/o issue. What I did see however was the recovery partition on the SSD was huge. On my 1 TB drive it’s the standard 450MB. On the SSD 40% of the 512MB drive was recovery partition…like 180GB, yeah GB not MB. The conclusion that the drive may be ill, might be correct. On the bottom of the EaseToDo back up there’s the note that Win10 AU requires sector by sector backup. I didn’t allow the update installation because I never did install AU. I don’t know why the huge recovery partition. Space was not an issue on the SSD even with the humongous recovery partition because I’ve only got 134GB of stuff on my hard drive, so why did the cloning process create that huge of recovery partition…..Anyhow, with all the issues and the painful morning, I’m back up and running with my trusty, dusty WD Black and I’ve mothballed the Crucial SSD.

Diane

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I ran the Crucial diags on it when it first failed and it was okay. I quick formatted it like you’re supposed to and then cloned my hard drive to the SSD w/o issue. What I did see however was the recovery partition on the SSD was huge. On my 1 TB drive it’s the standard 450MB. On the SSD 40% of the 512MB drive was recovery partition…like 180GB, yeah GB not MB. The conclusion that the drive may be ill, might be correct. On the bottom of the EaseToDo back up there’s the note that Win10 AU requires sector by sector backup. I didn’t allow the update installation because I never did install AU. I don’t know why the huge recovery partition. Space was not an issue on the SSD even with the humongous recovery partition because I’ve only got 134GB of stuff on my hard drive, so why did the cloning process create that huge of recovery partition…..Anyhow, with all the issues and the painful morning, I’m back up and running with my trusty, dusty WD Black and I’ve mothballed the Crucial SSD.

Diane

You did not mention HOW you cloned the drive. It’s important to make sure the clone software is SSD aware an re-aligns partitions to the proper sector size for the SSD. If you have sectors across multiple SSD blocks you are writing many extra blocks and will use up life on the SSD.
I used Casper to move a RAID0 set to a single SSD and got a 4X speed improvement.

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try a clean install on the SSD with no other disks installed.

Yep, my experience is that things go cleaner using only the 1 system disk to start with. I plug it into the 0 slot on the mobo, but afaik putting it elsewhere shouldn’t make a difference.

always use a full format.
…
I never use cloning. I use drive image/restore instead

Yep, as bbearen says, it makes life simpler in the long run if you eliminate as many variables as possible–and especially after a failed attempt. Full format, clean install, image restore–that’s the cleanest route.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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Given the oddity of the clone I’d go for a clean install and see how it performs, or use a different cloning program.

cheers, Paul

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[bbearren]

I never use the Quick Format option, always use a full format. It takes longer, but the entire drive is inspected in the process, and any bad sectors are automatically flagged and not used. Not that I expect bad sectors, just that it makes for one less thing to be concerned about.

As for partition sizes, after formatting I setup partitions myself using DISKPART rather than leaving them to chance. Again, one less thing, and no surprises.

And I never use cloning. I use drive image/restore instead.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

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• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by bbearren.

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+1 for Image/Restore.

HTH :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
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+1 for Image/Restore.

HTH :cheers:

Hear, hear!

Image or Clone often! Backup, backup, backup, backup......
- - - - -
Home Built: Windows 10 Home 64-bit, AMD Athlon II X3 435 CPU, 16GB RAM, ASUSTeK M4A89GTD-PRO/USB3 (AM3) motherboard, 512GB SanDisk SSD, 3 TB WD HDD, 1024MB ATI AMD RADEON HD 6450 video, ASUS VE278 (1920x1080) display, ATAPI iHAS224 Optical Drive, integrated Realtek HD Audio

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I don’t know if this is helpful, but there are posts in the Windows 10 forum: “AHCI – Enable in Windows 8 and Windows 10 after installation. This is the link: http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/?. ACHI has to be enabled in the bios and in Win 10. The instructions tell you how to enable ACHI in Windows 10 after installing it in IDE mode.

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I’ll tell the end result of my troubles with my Crucial MX100. I took it out of my PC and stuck it in my MacBook Pro “training laptop”. The OS erased and formatted it, found it and its fully functional. The drive apparently is okay.

I bought a Samsung 850EVO. Had to initialize it and create a simple volume for my PC to see it; ran their Data Migration software that cloned the drive successfully and didn’t mess with partition size like EaseUS software did with the Crucial(it used 1/3 of the drive and I couldn’t resize them for some reason).

Disconnected the HDD and installed the SSD; changed UEFI from IDE to AHCI and the drive did not work properly. Got BSOD telling me there was a problem with my PC. It was installed on Sata 0. So, knowing now that the problem was with my PC and two SSD’s neither of which were probably faulty, I did the “regedit” thing as recommended by the poster below to who I am very grateful.

I don’t know if this is helpful, but there are posts in the Windows 10 forum: “AHCI – Enable in Windows 8 and Windows 10 after installation. This is the link: http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/?. ACHI has to be enabled in the bios and in Win 10. The instructions tell you how to enable ACHI in Windows 10 after installing it in IDE mode.

This was the whole issue to start with. Why I didn’t have a problem with Windows 7 when I first used the Crucial is not known to me, but Win 10 requires the regedit fix. Of the 4 places where DWord had to be fixed, only two of mine were messed up, but after applying the changes, my SSD is fully functional. The manuals that Samsung provides are somewhat lacking. The install guide is just pictures. The cloning software is used that came with the drive was different than what was in the manual. The Samsung Magician software that installs first is the software you use after the drive is working, but not much is explained very well. Not a word anywhere about WIN10 and no native AHCI drivers. Anyhow, I am pleased with the new drive and happy as a clam that we were able to figure out what the problem was with the help of the OP.

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There are no AHCI drivers for disks, they are for the SATA controller only.

Your issue was converting from non-AHCI to AHCI after Windows was installed, so the registry fixes make sense.

cheers, Paul

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Got it. Thanks.

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