Bad block on SSD
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I've been getting intermittent BSODs for over a week now, mostly Unexpected Store Exception but a smattering of others.
I've finally managed to track down some helpful error messages, which are The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block.
I am more or less helpless when it comes to hardware issues, and very afraid of doing something to make things worse. Most of the advice I can find is to run
chkdsk /rto try and fix the issue but my hard drive is an SSD and I can't find anything that indicates whether that's still the appropriate measure.I seemed to find mixed opinions on running chkdsk on an SSD in general, varying from "do it" to "probably won't do anything" to "could be bad". Does anyone have any idea? Can anyone suggest anything else?
Windows 10 if it makes a difference. Laptop (ASUS). 18 months old, should be well within its useful lifetime.
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I've run chkdsk on SSD's before. It never occurred to me that that would cause problems.
The bad block thing is kind of scary, though. SSDs are supposed to have spare flash so they can transparently re-map any bad blocks without any OS or filesystem intervention. How old is the SSD, and has it been written to a lot? Maybe it's out of spare flash...
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Agree with @mott555 mott. chkdsk should be fine unless you have a ton of bad blocks and it ends up re-writing a lot of stuff (in which case the standard advice about lots of writes on SSDs applies).
I'd be looking at having a new disk on hand and backups ready.
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@mott555 18 months old, and I use it a fair amount but I don't think I do hugely write-intensive things to it. Mostly browsing the internet and a little light gaming.
CrystalDiskInfo says it's had less than 7TB written overall and 97% of lifespan remaining. But it said 0 for unused spare NAND blocks ... but it didn't flag that as bad and google seemed to have a consensus that that value could be misleading... the raw value for that said 2048.
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The very first thing you should do is make sure anything that might even be halfway important on the SSD is backed up somewhere else.
I'd do that even before running any sort of drive checks or utilities.
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Check this answer from Crucial
https://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/My-SSD-has-bad-sectors/ta-p/111486
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@TimeBandit That's not talking abut using the
/roption though. I'm clearly beyond the point of "if the number of bad sectors stays the same it's ok" and looking at replacing the drive if I can't fix it.
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@CarrieVS
/ris to recover data from the bad block. I really doubt it any use on an SSD.
/fis to try to fix it, probably just marking the bad sectors as bad.I wouldn't bother with /r, but I would use /f
Also, buy another SSD ASAP
Edit: they suggest running with
/r
https://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/How-to-schedule-a-check-disk-on-your-drive/ta-p/179020
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@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
Also, buy another SSD ASAP
You don't think it's worth trying to fix it then?
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@CarrieVS I'm not an SSD specialist, but I think that if you have bad blocks, it means that you ran out of spare blocks
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@TimeBandit Any ideas on why this would happen after 18 months and 3% of it's supposed lifespan? I don't want to buy a new drive and pay someone to fit it* if there could be something wrong with the computer that's causing it to do this.
*I know what you're going to say and no. I am not fitting my own. I don't care how easy y'all say it is, I don't want to and my reasons are my own. Please don't try and convince me otherwise.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
Any ideas on why this would happen after 18 months and 3% of it's supposed lifespan?
A bad drive
If it's only 18 months old, isn't it still under warranty?
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
Any ideas on why this would happen after 18 months and 3% of it's supposed lifespan?
The key word there is supposed. The lifespan numbers probably follow some kind of average or median value, but there will always be outliers.
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@mott555 said in Bad block on SSD:
The key word there is supposed. The lifespan numbers probably follow some kind of average or median value, but there will always be outliers.
I mean lifespan in terms of amount of data written, not time. Isn't that supposed to be less variable for SSDs?
@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
If it's only 18 months old, isn't it still under warranty?
I didn't pay for an extended warranty.
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@CarrieVS
I've seen SSDs fail after a few months, and I have others that are many years old and still going strong.It could also be some kind of controller failure rather than a flash failure.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
I didn't pay for an extended warranty.
What about the "legal" warranty.
Aren't you in UK?
Don't you have customer protection law that mandate a 2 year warranty?
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@mott555 said in Bad block on SSD:
It could also be some kind of controller failure rather than a flash failure.
And that means...? Controller of what? Is that something that would also be solved by replacing the drive or something I would need to fix separately or does it mean I need to write off my PC unless I want to burn through hard drives all the time? I realise that I'm very ignorant here but I do not know what I am talking about with anything at this level.
@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
What about the "legal" warranty.
Aren't you in UK?
Don't you have customer protection law that mandate a 2 year warranty?Never heard of it. Having briefly googled suggests that the hassle and trouble and time being without my computer that it would take to try and get it fixed by someone who's making a loss on fixing it instead of by someone who's making a profit are probably not going to be worth it unless the PC is a write-off.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
Controller of what? Is that something that would also be solved by replacing the drive
The controller that is part of the SSD
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@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
Aren't you in UK?
Don't you have customer protection law that mandate a 2 year warranty?The short answer is no.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
Controller of what? Is that something that would also be solved by replacing the drive or something I would need to fix separately or does it mean I need to write off my PC unless I want to burn through hard drives all the time?
Controller on the drive.
IMO just backup anything you need and get the drive replaced.
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@loopback0 said in Bad block on SSD:
The short answer is no.
Wasn't Apple forced to update it's website specifically for the UK because of this?
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@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
Wasn't Apple forced to update it's website specifically for the UK because of this?
Apple offer a 1 year warranty in the UK like everyone else.
While consumer laws actually stretch to 6 years, it's not as simple as "my phone has broken after 3 years, replace it please". Hence my original comment.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
What about the "legal" warranty.
Aren't you in UK?
Don't you have customer protection law that mandate a 2 year warranty?Never heard of it. Having briefly googled suggests that the hassle and trouble and time being without my computer that it would take to try and get it fixed by someone who's making a loss on fixing it instead of by someone who's making a profit are probably not going to be worth it unless the PC is a write-off.
Or you could buy another drive, clone data, warranty repair the old one - this way, you avoid downtime, and after a few weeks you have a spare drive. Or if you feel extra onion, buy, clone, warranty repair, pray it's done fast, clone back to old drive, return new drive back to the store within legal time window.
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@loopback0 said in Bad block on SSD:
While consumer laws actually stretch to 6 years, it's not as simple as "my phone has broken after 3 years, replace it please"
I'm glad I live in Quebec
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@CarrieVS There's a microcontroller executing its own firmware/software that's hidden inside the SSD. Could be a bug or failure on that which causes it to report bad blocks even if there are no bad blocks in the flash chips. Or maybe it's unable to remap the bad block to spare flash even if there's still spare flash. Controller bugs are not unusual, and you'd still need to replace the SSD.
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@Gąska said in Bad block on SSD:
Or you could buy another drive, clone data, warranty repair the old one - this way, you avoid downtime, and after a few weeks you have a spare drive. Or if you feel extra onion, buy, clone, warranty repair, pray it's done fast, clone back to old drive, return new drive back to the store within legal time window.
Are you assuming here that I'm capable and willing to swap the internal hard drive of my own laptop? See above...
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
@Gąska said in Bad block on SSD:
Or you could buy another drive, clone data, warranty repair the old one - this way, you avoid downtime, and after a few weeks you have a spare drive. Or if you feel extra onion, buy, clone, warranty repair, pray it's done fast, clone back to old drive, return new drive back to the store within legal time window.
Are you assuming here that I'm capable and willing to swap the internal hard drive of my own laptop? See above...
Besides, your laptop maker could be like Apple - and soldered the SSD chip directly to the motherboard...
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
Are you assuming here that I'm capable and willing to swap the internal hard drive of my own laptop?
You could pay someone to do it for you.
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@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
You could pay someone to do it for you.
Yes. But doesn't that defeat the object of trying to get a warranty repair (which I probably can't get anyway)?
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I had the exact same problem happen with a relatively new Dell laptop's SDD several years ago. The exact same BSOD error message and everything. Afterwards, I could power up the laptop and log in but couldn't run any applications.
Dell's tech support told me to reinstall Windows on the computer. I had done a full disk backup of the computer about a week beforehand, so I just restored that backup onto the drive after making copies of everything important. That fixed the problem and the drive still functions properly today.
I don't know exactly how lucky I was with that particular drive, but if that ever happens again I'm replacing the offending drive immediately.
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I should probably confess (and for the sake of not getting too far off topic you can all just downvote and I'll imagine being yelled at) that I don't have proper backups. I have got most of my personal files that I wouldn't want to lose, apart from a few of the newest, in OneDrive but getting an external drive and setting up proper backups has been on my to-do list for the last year.
Just now ordered a drive, so I guess I'd better manage (I do have my old PC that still just about works) until it arrives and I can back up everything and then I'll see if anything fixes it, and find someone to change the drive for me if not.
Many thanks all of you.
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I used to swap out slow physical hard drives out for SSDs at my last job.
DON'T BUY PATRIOT
I had like a 25% failure rate for 60GB patriot drives in like 6 months.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
@Gąska said in Bad block on SSD:
Or you could buy another drive, clone data, warranty repair the old one - this way, you avoid downtime, and after a few weeks you have a spare drive. Or if you feel extra onion, buy, clone, warranty repair, pray it's done fast, clone back to old drive, return new drive back to the store within legal time window.
Are you assuming here that I'm capable and willing to swap the internal hard drive of my own laptop? See above...
You could probably find someone who knows how to do it and wouldn't mind. It's super simple; it basically just takes a little screwdriver and then it's plug-and-play. The more tedious process is going to be re-installing Windows and your programs and then restoring your backed-up files onto the new disk.
One thing you might try, after you've backed up your important documents onto a thumb drive or something, is running the Windows System File Checker. After running that, I'd suggest burning recovery disks, if you still can do so. Open the Start menu and start typing "recovery" and see whether it gives an option to create a recovery drive. That will create a disk that you can use to reinstall Windows if you end up having to have the hard drive replaced.
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@anotherusername said in Bad block on SSD:
You could probably find someone who knows how to do it and wouldn't mind.
The only people I know IRL with the know-how are colleagues and there's no-one I'm friendly enough with to feel comfortable asking them to fix my personal computer so I can avoid paying for someone. Much as I complain about paying (I was raised in Yorkshire) I would honestly rather pay than either mess with my own hardware or feel like I was imposing on someone.
I will bear the rest of your suggestions in mind once I've got a proper backup. Thank you.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
I should probably confess ... that I don't have proper backups
Most people don't. It's like a really expensive insurance policy. Most people can get by with a less robust "policy" because all they care about is a few documents and photos and those are relatively easy to store in a cloud service somewhere. The probability that a really bad event would occur where you need the "full" coverage is very low.
Losing a few paragraphs out of a document because you forgot to save it is a much more urgent issue than worrying about having your computer's drive die on you. Yet even that sense of urgency is not nearly as strong as it used to be due to cloud storage and automatic document recovery. How many people go about their business without even thinking about the possibility that something could happen that would cause them to lose their data? The fact that you even had the notion to set up a backup system puts you way ahead of most people.
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@Placeholder said in Bad block on SSD:
The fact that you even had the notion to set up a backup system puts you way ahead of most people.
But I am theoretically an IT person. I think I'm supposed to know better.
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I don't have a proper backup solution either, at least not for my main home laptop. I just keep everything important synced between it and a USB flash drive, and anything else I consider disposable. (It doesn't take me that long to set up a new Windows 10 install from scratch, especially on a good NVMe drive.)
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
@Placeholder said in Bad block on SSD:
The fact that you even had the notion to set up a backup system puts you way ahead of most people.
But I am theoretically an IT person. I think I'm supposed to know better.
My engineering coworkers should know better too. I don't think I've convinced anyone who wasn't already doing backups to start doing them. They just don't have the sense of urgency to actually do something about their situation. Maybe you will have better luck convincing people you know by telling your story?
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
But I am theoretically an IT person. I think I'm supposed to know better.
The Cobbler's children have no shoes
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@Placeholder said in Bad block on SSD:
I don't think I've convinced anyone who wasn't already doing backups to start doing them.
What is a good, not too expensive backup solution for, say, about a TB of data?
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@HardwareGeek said in Bad block on SSD:
What is a good, not too expensive backup solution for, say, about a TB of data?
A 2 TB external hard drive, and
robocopy.(I have backups, but I don't have offsite backups. That's the part that I'm always afraid is going to hose me at some point... although I'll probably have bigger things to worry about at that point.)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Bad block on SSD:
I have backups, but I don't have offsite backups.
Bring your external hard drive to work once your backup is done.
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@TimeBandit My personal backups aren't an external hard drive; I have a Windows Server Essentials 2016 server that my client computers back up to. All of its storage (for the backups and my other drives) are mirrored storage spaces to protect against drive failure.
However, "not too expensive" rules that out. :)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Bad block on SSD:
I have a Windows Server Essentials 2016 server that my client computers back up to.
I have a Synology NAS.
I'm not dragging that to my work
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@mott555 said in Bad block on SSD:
It could also be some kind of controller failure rather than a flash failure.
This. A client had a batch of Lenovo Yogas that died due to what was likely controller failure after 18-24 months. All of them came with HDDs and 16GB SSDs and were part of the interim part of Ultrabooks before they went full SSD. Every single one of them started dying off with controller failure and we initially thought it was HDD failure and had similar symptoms to what @CarrieVS is describing. We replaced the HDDs with full SSDs on the first two and they totally failed shortly after and would not recognize a drive at all except for the 16GB m.2 SSDs.
That doesn't mean that is what this is in this case, but it is possible and not without precedent.
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@TimeBandit said in Bad block on SSD:
The controller that is part of the SSD
Or the controller of the drives.
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@Polygeekery said in Bad block on SSD:
Every single one of them started dying off with controller failure and we initially thought it was HDD failure and had similar symptoms to what @Carrianna is describing.
Imagine @Carrianna's confusion at suddenly being mentioned here...
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
@Placeholder said in Bad block on SSD:
The fact that you even had the notion to set up a backup system puts you way ahead of most people.
But I am theoretically an IT person. I think I'm supposed to know better.
Did you forget what site you are on? IT people are idiots. Present company not excluded. I am not even excluding myself from that.
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@brie said in Bad block on SSD:
@Polygeekery said in Bad block on SSD:
Every single one of them started dying off with controller failure and we initially thought it was HDD failure and had similar symptoms to what @Carrianna is describing.
Imagine @Carrianna's confusion at suddenly being mentioned here...
Goddamn it.
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@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
I seemed to find mixed opinions on running chkdsk on an SSD in general, varying from "do it" to "probably won't do anything" to "could be bad". Does anyone have any idea? Can anyone suggest anything else?
Chkdsk is for repairing filesystem corruption. It's (supposedly) largely unneeded since Windows 8-ish and self-healing, but it can't hurt, especially if you're just using the normal read-only mode (you have to tell it "Yes, I want you to actually try fixing things").
You're probably thinking more about defragment tools, which do have bad consequences and are extremely discouraged for SSDs.
But, if your SSD has reported a "bad block" then most likely it has run out of spares (from the so-called "over-provision" area of the memory) and can no longer compensate for wear and tear.
Recommendation is to just replace it, they're fairly cheap so long as you don't need super-FPS-gamer quality.
Now to read the thread...
