Brace yourselves, this is a long(ish) story and not a pretty one either Specs: OCZ Vertex 120 - System Disk - OS, Main Programs) WD Velociraptor (300 GB) - User files storage, user libraries & data etc Lightscribe drive Asus P6T Deluxe 6 GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 @ ~18000MHz Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz Corsair HX620W Asus GTX260 TOP 896 MB/ 650MHz Windows 7 Professional x64 Avast! Antivirus Professional Edition I'm going to try and make this as short as possible but I want to include as much information as possible so please bear with me. This PC has run flawlessly up to now. It's a fantastic and reliable machine. Well - it used to be. Early last week I was working on my PC with three applications running in the foreground. Firefox (with about 50 tabs open), Steam with Counter Strike Source running and iTunes. Xfire was also running in the background along with another half dozen or so system tray background applications. On a map change in Source on a 24/7 cs_office server, my CS:S client threw an error stating that my map named cs_office differed from the servers. This has been a common problem with updates to the source client before so I closed the game, deleted the necessary files (clientregistry.blob and some map files), restarted Steam and tried joining the same server again. Same error. I went to consult google for the proper fix having minimized CS, and Firefox locked up and stopped responding. I ended the FF process via task manager and re-launched Firefox. It locked up again whilst trying to restore my tabs. At that point I thought the system memory might need flushed out as I put my PC to "sleep" a lot, instead of shutting it down, so I did a hard reset and let it boot Windows up in normal mode, which it did successfully. When it loaded the desktop though, I was faced with a few errors - the main and most worrying of which was a DLL error referring to "cabinet.dll" entitled "Air Mouse - Bad Image". It basically stated that "Cabinet.dll" was either not a valid Windows program or was not designed to be run on Windows and had been shut down. At this point a few more of my startup programs started throwing similar program experienced an error and Windows has closed it" errors - Steam, Displayfusion, John's Background Switcher, Appigo Sync server etc etc. At that point I scheduled a boot-time virus scan, which found nothing. iTunes ran fine, Firefox ran fine but all my bookmarks were gone and would not restore from backups, and it ran without add-ons. IE ran fine as well. Steam would not start, and dll errors got thrown up at almost every other program that I tried to launch. I tried the following to rectify this: - System restore: Wouldn't run at first, when it eventually did all my system restore points had magically vanished. - Repair at startup using Windows Disk - ran but failed to change anything. - Checkdisk - Would not run on the drive, not even at boot-up. When scheduled, Windows just booted up as normal without running the disk check. - Memtest - just on the off chance that some of my Dominator GT had errors I ran this from a '98 dos formatted memory stick. The memory modules checked out fine after several hours of very in-depth testing. As the week wore on, more and more things went wrong with Windows on that PC. DLL's vanished, programs started sometimes but not always and it seemed that the Windows installation got more and more corrupted the more I used the PC. Then it decided that my copy of Windows was not genuine, and ran with a black desktop and the usual software counterfeiting errors upon startup. I was half way through backing up my first DVD of program data so that I could format the SSD and reinstall Windows when the first hang ocurred. Hard reset allowed Windows to boot again but the same thing happened again when I tried opening Windows Explorer, a system hang. That happened several times and I eventually gave up and decided to put the SSD into an external USB caddy and connect it to my laptop to retrieve and back up the data. Upon connecting it to the laptop I was asked if I would like to scan and fix the drive, which I attempted. The checkdisk operation hung around 60% of the way though, and after that the disk would appear in Windows explorer but was not accessible. I rebooted the laptop and reconnected the SSD in it's caddy and the drive did not appear in Win Explorer at all. After putting it back into my PC and connecting it via SATA, it won't even appear in the BIOS now. My SSD is DEAD and I have lost 120GB of data (the disk was pretty much full) about 20-30GB of which was extremely important program data and configuration files. Here's my question for the people of bit-tech: Did Windows, a faulty SSD or a virus cause this? Windows getting corrupted could have been a result of either a virus or memory corruption on the NAND chips of the SSD. Then again, Windows itself could have caused this, installing a bad update or wrongly trying to read/write something within the registry files (Cabinet.dll) that ended up causing a chain reaction of problems. Can anything be done about this? Will I get a new disk if I RMA the broken one given these strange circumstances? The disk is nowhere near one year old - it was purchased at the start of March this year. Thanks in advance. I hope someone can make sense of this because it has me both very confused and very angry :/
Hi mate, I've had something similar happen to my old vertex drive, it was a while ago granted and I don't specifically remember having problems with my windows install beforehand (That's not to say I hadn't but It definitely wasn't as severe as hanging etc.) Similar outcome though, dead drive, won't show up using a caddy in another PC or via the BIOS, the only way it would appear is if I used a jumped on the 2 pins on the rear of the drive then accessed it in the BIOS in which case I would get it showing up as "YATAPDONGOGOOG" or something very similar to that, I contacted OCZ and was told to RMA the drive and succesfully recieved a new drive the following week which has been fine ever since. The first drive died after 9-10 months use I think it was, completely out of the blue for me as you normally expect errors to occur in the first few weeks if the drive is faulty. I realise this probably won't help you towards fixing your drive but if you can check the drive with the jumper and you get a similar result then you know it's a dead drive and an RMA will be possible.
There has been a virus going about that does this, it gets into the root and disables all the features that you would normally use to shut it down. i found that a virus scan would halt it long enough to kill the processes it was running, then booted into safe mode and got it out with maleware bytes.There was also another virus about that give all the symptoms of a dead hard drive by destroying all the sectors and making them show up as bad so that windows thinks the HDD is knackered. The disc can be recovered easily enough, but you will loose any data on it. The problem then had with the first virus i mentioned is getting all the stuff that it stopped to run again, in the end I had to reinstall as it was doing my head in.
Thanks for the replies guys... Given what you've said, I think it's best to just RMA the drive and not bother trying to even get this one working again. Even if I did get it to show up in the BIOS again, it probably wouldn't ever be the same and I wouldn't trust it. I'll just add that what makes this even more ironic and infuriating is that I've always been SUPER careful with mechanical disks, and have never lost so much as a megabyte of data to a mechanical hard drive failing. I put this SSD into that machine not only for increased performance, but for increased reliability. Go figure
