SSD drive has suddenly become unbootable

[Phil Bee]

Running Win7(Pro) on a 3 or 4 years old PC with a 1 Tb mechanical hard drive and a 6-month old 250Gb Samsung EVO SSD.

The SSD has been excellent - until yesterday, when, immediately after after making a trivial change to config.sys, the system crashed. The SSD drive will not now boot. On attempted bootup, the 'Starting Windows' logo shows up, then the computer halts with a black screen and cursor.

Attempting to repair the SSD with the Win7 System CD Startup Repair didn't either detect or fix any errors.

I can get the PC up and running by booting from the 1Tb hard drive. Then the SSD and its contents appear to be OK - but of course this 'solution' does not give any of the SSD's speed advantages.

Easeus Partition manager only shows the "C: partition" on the SSD. There is no hidden boot sector. It shows the allocated drive is 209Gb and total disc space is 232Gb. Obviously the drive is not bootable because the hidden system sector has been erased.

I cannot get the Samsung software which came with the drive to do anything so am considering using Easeus partition manager to create a 10 or 15Gb bootable sector from the unallocated space on the drive.

Is this the right way forward or do you have any better suggestions please. I do have a fairly recent Easeus backup of the 'hidden sector' if it is of any use - but was afraid restoring it to the SSD as might cause more problems.

Many thanks for your time and suggestions

Phil

 

[Ranger4]

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

What change did you make to the config.sys. It would seem that whatever that change was it has resulted in your current problem.

Please provide as much info as you can on what you changed.

 

[AddRAM]

Did you try a using a restore point by running the Windows 7 install disc ?

Did you store any disk images on the hard drive ?

 

[Mark Phelps]

Why are you messing around with a Windows-98-era configuration file? If you want to change windows configuration settings in Win7, you should be using "msconfig".

 

[Phil Bee]

Thank you all for your interest and replies.

Quote..Why are you messing around with a Windows-98-era configuration file? If you want to change windows configuration settings in Win7, you should be using "msconfig".
..Sorry - typo - I did use msconfig!

I changed msconfig because I noticed that Google Chrome was not updating. It was still on version 37.something (- currently 39.something). Both the Google update services in system configuration were stopped and unticked so I enabled them. The PC died immediately after pressing OK. I presume Msconfig is effectively stored in the hidden partition and presumably the write operation went horribly wrong.

I notice that at the moment, with the system booted to the original hard drive, both Google update Services (gupdate and gupdatem) are both unticked and stopped (on 11/04/14 - don't know if that is UK (April) or US (Nov) date. However Chrome IS now up to date. Interestingly, I installed the SSD in April.

I did try to do an MS restore but it would not work. Have always disliked the Microsoft backup system so tend to rely on Easeus Backup. That is still available to me but I have never ever used it to restore a hidden partition so I was a bit reluctant to take the plunge.

I still hope that restoring the hidden partition from my Easeus backup will do the trick

Continued thanks to you all

Phil