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Failing SSD - is it a hardware or software prooblem?
One of my PCs is having problems. The PC is set up (with EasyBCD) to multiboot to either Windows 7x64 or Windows XP. The Windows 7 O/S is on an OCZ Vertex2 SSD and when I boot into that O/S, I can carry on working (or playing!) for several minutes, but at some stage things freeze up and I have to reset the PC in order to reboot it. When I do, the boot screens that come up show that the SSD is now missing, so I boot into Windows XP.
Once in XP, if I shut down the PC and boot again (seems I have to shut down and restart to see the SSD. If I just reboot from XP, the SSD is still not there, though I am not sure if that'd be the case every time), the SSD is back, and I can boot into Win7 with no problem - I have done this many times now and the SSD is always there after I shut down in XP and then restart from 'off'. But then it soon freezes up again and on rebooting, the same thing - no SSD shows. And so on, as above..
I ran checkdisk and it found & corrected a few odd errors, but the problem persists. I downloaded 'SSD Utility' and installed it into Windows 7 (not sure how much use that programme is?)..
SSD Utility - SSD Management Software
It shows no health issues with the drive that I can see, (but shows that I can update the drive's firmware if I make a bootable drive and do it from there. I haven't done that yet - can't see that that is the issue here).
What do you make of this? If the drive were failing, why does it always show up when I boot? The behaviour doesn't seem consistent with the SSD being on the verge of a physical failure (??). I could reinstall Windows I guess, and see if the issue remains (rather do that as a last resort) ... anyone any ideas as to how I can determine whether this is software or hardware related?
Thanks