SSD won't boot anymore

Question

Yesterday I put the computer to sleep. Something went wrong because it didn't go fully to sleep. So I restarted the pc and now it won't boot windows 7 anymore. It said : "Please insert valid boot device". I ran Windows 7 restore disc and tried restoring, first it said, mbr fixed. No result but now it said : "Operating system could not be loaded" I ran Windows 7 restore disc again and then it said something about a corrupt partition and that he fixed it. But got the same msg at restart about operating system not found. I ran Windows 7 restore disc again and used diskpart and watched the volumes. My SSD shows up as RAW filesystem... not as NTFS. The size of the disk seems correct. In the bios it also shows up as Healthy disk.

What could went wrong and could I recover data with testdisk? I assume something went wrong with the partition :(.

It's a Plextor SSD 256M2P SSD, only 3 months old.

Thx in advance

Solution

You can boot off the Windows 7 disk, open the command prompt and running a check disk, i.e chkdsk /r C:, on the SSD. Please reference this site for step by step instructions: http://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=6565/. Also try running the Bootrec.exe utility from the command prompt while you're in the recovery environment too, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/. I don't like the automated Windows 7 recovery tools because they never seem to work.

If all else fails, you should try attaching the SSD to another PC running Windows 7 and boot off of Parted Magic, http://partedmagic.com/doku.php/, and see if you can mount and extract the data.

After extracting the data to somewhere safe, reinstall Windows 7 on the SSD.

I've had a SSD completely die on me where I had "Please insert valid boot device". Attaching it to another computer or using the recovery environment didn't even recognize the drive.

Comments

[Ramhound]

It sounds like the drive's controller is starting to fail.

[LordrAider]

I got lucky :), I used gparted live cd, then used testdisk , he saw the lost partitions and rewrote them. Then at reboot boot manager popped up :). Need to do a single repair with repair disc to fix the bootrec and WOOHA , there was windows booting again. From RAW to a booting windows, must donate to testdisk now :p

[Davide Steduto]

I saw your comment to @bradbajuz later. Testdisk to me won't work, it is a standalone application to run when an Operating System works on another disk/cd. The fact that the SSD is not recognized it also lead to not start any new OS because OS wants load the disk, but the disk doesn't answer, and I am stuck again during the startup even with the new OS. Thanks God to you did work :) at least.

[LordrAider]

Yes :) , indeed it was

[DavidPostill]

Welcome to Super User! While this may answer the question, it would be a better answer if you could provide some explanation why it does so.

[Davidenko]

Certainty doubt that your answer will help OP.