PC won't recognize SSD, won't boot, cant repair

[tihane123]

Hi forum!

I found this SSD from my shelf, an SSD I wrecked a few years ago. I tried to fix it back then but got to a dead end a bought a new one. As far as I know it has been in the same spot for 2 years so I havent broken it more over the last 2 years.

Here is where I'm at:

If I connect it to my PC along with my current working SSD, I won't get past the POST screen. Cannot enter bios either. If I press DEL it say "entering bios" but its lying and will stay there indefinitely.

If I connect only the broken SSD(and unconnect my working SSD), I can boot from USB windows and I can get to bios(note that it connects to bios ~30 sec after pressing DEL). However none of those recognize my SSD. Nothing in BOOT priority and cannot install windows since there are no drives to be installed on. When I click startup repair when installing windows, on the top(where it should say the driver letter) it just reads uknown drive.

Sometimes when I enter bios and leave bios, this screen pops up right after:

Can anyone help me on what to do next or how to solve this issue?

I should also note that as far as I remember, the way I broke it is I wanted to delete some stuff from regedit, but messed up and deleted core files.

Thanks for any help!

 

[georgeks]

What happens if you first boot into the Windows desktop, and then connect the SSD?

Don't worry its hot pluggable.

Maybe the disk signature is wrong, or no drive letter is assigned to it.

 

[tihane123]

Tried to plug in both right now. Nothing happens. Should I plug one of them in before booting up?

 

[georgeks]

Plug in the SSD you have your working system on.

After it boots into the Windows desktop, connect the old SSD.

 

[Megahertz07]

If with only the suspicious SSD connected to the MB BIOS doesn't recognize it, the SSD is dead. Don't waste your time.

 

[JohnnyW]

When a piece of hardware acts flakey, I always testbed it on one of my machines using the ssmallest number of connected devices possible. In this case, I'd connect only the SSD, and an optical (CD, DVD or BlueRay) drive, and boot using a GPartEd live CD. This eliminates windows issues, win driver issues, all sorts of potential firmware issues with add on cards and/or "above board" GPU cards etc.

There's no telling what the last system configuration changes you made were just before the issue started because that was so long ago. Did you add a $13 2 port RAID card using an inexpensive chipset with tons of known issues? Did you change or add a second graphics card? Do you have a mixture of Intel ICHxx based and Marvel chipset based SATA controllers on the motherboard? (EG: Asus P8Z77-V LE motherboards used a particularly cantankerous combination of Intel and Marvel RAID enabled controllers. Add to that, the board offered in my example has 2 USB 3.0 ports provided by the Intel north/south bridge's native support, and 2 USB 3.0 ports via (a less expensive) ASMedia (Asus) onboard secondary USB 3.0 chipset with it's own set of drivers.)

If you have a VERY basic motherboard with Intel based SATA support, boot the system with nothing but memory, CD or DVD drive, your SSD drive, video keyboard and mouse installed/connected, booting from a GPartEd live CD. If you can not make any changes to the drive this way, you're not likely to see the drive work again under any circumstances.

Always eliminate ALL potential hardware/firmware/OS/and driver right off the bat. That's why having a basic, known good, no frills test-bed is invaluable in diagnosing hardware issues.