Crucial m4 Bricked... warning

T

tangoseal

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Dec 18, 2010
Messages
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I will warn you, as good as the firmware 010g sounds on paper, it bricked mine last night.

I had a 256GB M4 that was completely rendered a paper weight. Firmware flash, using boot method, indicated a successful flash etc.... yeah sure whatever.

Now I got to RMA this thing. Worst part...I am transitioning from my old NAS which I sold to building a new one and I forgot to do a complete backup of my SSD before hand to my only remaining external drive sigh...... Lost all kinds of good stuff for sure.

Yup... you are warned.
 
Good thing I have a laptop to work on as well...

Funny thing is ... I upgraded firmware on my laptops ... m4 256GB MSATA SSD (this laptop I am typing this reply on) and it worked just fine.
 
It's a good thing Crucial has great warranty service, at least in my experience. Sorry for your loss :(
 
I installed 010G on my drive when it came out in late September and it has been working just fine since then.

Did you read the warning regarding trying to use the updater on a UEFI based system? I don't know if that could be your problem, but something people should be aware of.
 
felix88 said:
I installed 010G on my drive when it came out in late September and it has been working just fine since then.
Click to expand...

Same here, installed 010G on my two 256GB M4's without issue - I didn't even have to disable RAID.
 
tangoseal said:
Yup... you are warned.
Click to expand...

No offense, sounds like you just had bad luck - there's no inherent problem with upgrading to 010G, I've done dozens of these and if it was a widespread problem the Crucial forums would be crippled with redundant complaint threads. Granted, when you're the one that gets struck by the bad luck bug then none of that matters.

In any case don't give up on it just yet. I've had cases where a torn write (abrupt loss of power or reset during a write operation) places the controller into somewhat of a limbo and the drive *appears* bricked since its non-responsive at POST and unseen by BIOS.

First step is connect it to SATA and power, power on your system as usual, wait 5 minutes, then CTRL-ALT-DEL or push reset (do not power off and back on) and see if the BIOS recognizes it.

If that doesn't work, try the following: Disconnect SATA cable from drive but leave it plugged into power, power on and wait 30 minutes, power OFF and wait 30 seconds, power back ON and wait 30 minutes, power back OFF and wait another 30 seconds. Finally, power on and see if its recognized by BIOS. I've seen this work and its also a process I've seen Crucial support recommend.

If either of the above bring it back to life then copy your data off, and if/when you're able to do that then afterward perform a secure internal erase with Parted Magic to restore the drive to factory condition. In my experience the internal secure erase was the only thing that fixed the torn write issue causing the controller to hang at powerup while it was busy with some internal operation or stuck in a loop. Finally, re-attempt the firmware flash and if it dies again (which I'd highly doubt) then RMA. Good luck.
 
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You have a good chance to bring back to life that M4, because there is a known issue with the 010G firmware. You could try the following:
Connect the SSD towards power only. Once you have the drive connected and sitting idle, simply power on the computer and wait for 20 minutes. We recommend that you don't use the computer during this process.
Power the computer down and disconnect the drive for 30 seconds.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 one more time.
Reconnect the drive normally, and boot the computer to your operating system.
Click to expand...
It worked for some people... :rolleyes:
 
That 20 minute trick has worked for me on a few occasions. For some reason my M4 doesn't like me going into my BIOS (I'm on an MSI Z77A-GD5).
I thought I'd lost my M4, but that has worked every time thus far.
 
And that is why i love hf. Thanks you all. Im gonna attempt these troubleshooting steps.
 
have one of these and 3 more coming from today's egg deal

posting in win thread so I can find it again
 
tangoseal said:
Good thing I have a laptop to work on as well...

Funny thing is ... I upgraded firmware on my laptops ... m4 256GB MSATA SSD (this laptop I am typing this reply on) and it worked just fine.
Click to expand...

I have that same laptop and the same 256GB mSata Crucial drive, I updated it a few days ago, went fine.
 
hmm..can't just try to plug/unplug while booting?..boot plug..maybe red light/...shut off. boot again..plug..maybe green light=fixed.idk..I've resurrected a couple ssds..but they were OCZ.Basically, keep the SATA cable attached and fiddle with the power plug.
 
schmuckley said:
hmm..can't just try to plug/unplug while booting?..boot plug..maybe red light/...shut off. boot again..plug..maybe green light=fixed.idk..I've resurrected a couple ssds..but they were OCZ.Basically, keep the SATA cable attached and fiddle with the power plug.
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I will consider that... Right now I am trying the

No sata - plug up power for 30 mins unlug 30 secs plug back up 30 mins then connect sata after reboot and see what happens. Im on my second 30 min phase right now.
 
You have tonfucking be kidding me????

I just powered on my laptop with msata m4 been wotking for days and now it is broken. Ssd wont detect etc... what the fuck both my computers are down? Crucial just fucked me period.
 
What the fuck? Two m4s perfectly flashed and both broken...... what the fuck am i supposed to do? The laptop waa working fine for 3 days and now wont detect msata ssd. The 30 min trick failed miserably.
 
Do you have any other computers you can try them on - maybe at work or a friend's? Seeing if any other computers can see them would be the first step.
Contacting Crucial would be another. I know that M4's have issues with being detected, but when I was scouring their forums a few weeks ago I almost never saw anyone having data loss issues. Their support people seem to be pretty good, so at least that's a decent sign.

Oh yeah - as an FYI, with the 30 minute trick - try making sure you're sitting idle in your BIOS and be sure to unplug both the power and the SATA cable. It has something to do with the drive treating it as a power cycle.
 
Thanks..... after raging about this and keeping at it... I was able to restore the laptop MSATA M4. Now I am going to reflash back down to the last firmware. Screw thisbuggy 010g firmware. I do not need instability for a marginal gain of 0.0005% performance.

The 20 min (official crucial method) worked using my laptop sitting in bios as it doesnt have UEFI. I will now try this with my 2.5" M4 in the laptop hard drive bay to see if it will work.
 
felix88 said:
I installed 010G on my drive when it came out in late September and it has been working just fine since then.

Did you read the warning regarding trying to use the updater on a UEFI based system? I don't know if that could be your problem, but something people should be aware of.
Click to expand...

+1. I updated to it without issue on my main machine.
 
Restored them both...
Im going to completely secure erase these things and then hope they hold strong.

As far as the 2.5" M4 wow ... had to try 5 different PC's to get it to work. Finally got it to recognize on an old AMD Athlon X2 machine I had to build real fast from spare parts in the basement to get it to work right.
 
I've had 010G on one of my 128 M4s for about 10 days now with zero issues. And it was flashed on a board with a UEFI bios.
 
There's clearly something up with the M4's and getting different set-ups to recognize them...but even Crucial themselves isn't sure what it is. Had I not realized that changing my BIOS settings seems to cause issues with mine, I supposed I'd never have known.
 
Domingo said:
There's clearly something up with the M4's and getting different set-ups to recognize them...but even Crucial themselves isn't sure what it is. Had I not realized that changing my BIOS settings seems to cause issues with mine, I supposed I'd never have known.
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I thought it was getting better. My friend had the firmware version that eventually leads to an hourly crash, and he wasn't able to update using anything before 10G. No amount of BIOS settings or even hot plugging allowed the update program to detect the drive.

With 10G it finally worked. Firmware update and no more problems. Fortunately, it was not using UEFI.
 
I just got a 128G M4 and it shipped with 010G and it was not being detected on every boot which started to bug me a bit... I was thinking about getting an intel 330 and returning this one.. but flashed back to 000f and going to try that for a bit before I go the intel route. Hopefully 000f fixes the issue. Right off the bad AS SSD benchmark shows small boost in read and write perf... I went to from a 680something with 010g to 784 with 000f! so I guess that's good... test cold boots all work so far... fingers crossed.
 
In my experience with the drive - it's pretty much bulletproof and extremely quick, however I'd never recommend it to anyone who tinkers with the BIOS very often.
If you're just an everyday PC user or a "set it and leave it" overclocker, you'll likely have no issues at all. I've had no problems at all with normal usage in the 6 months I've had mine. However, going into the BIOS (mine is a UEFI) is a risky proposition.
The new Corsair and Samsung drives seems to be getting good marks, so I'd probably consider those, too, if I were shopping today.

Pretty much no matter what drive people get, there's something really, really awesome about having a SSD with a ton of capacity. Prices are still steep, but at least I've enjoyed the results.
 
Had the same issue with 2xm4's and the latest firmware. Could have sworn both drives were completely bricked (not reporting in bios, tried multiple pcs same thing) came back a few hours later after leaving pc on and in the bios and they worked fine. Happened again a few days later and same thing they came back alive after a few hours of the pc just sitting there at the bios screen. Downgraded the firmware to 000f and havent had a problem since (its been a few weeks now) seems the new firmware has some serious issues.
 
Thanks for the heads up. I have 2 M4's and a Sandisk Extreme. I tend to update when it's deemed unnecessary.
 
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i having the internet exsplorer issue of hanging when closing many pages ? the mouse pionter jest spins cant get ou of i i have the 010g already loaded.:confused:
 
Odd im having a similar issue. If i shut down by holding the power button the bios won't be able to read the Crucial M4 128gb drive anymore. Odd thing is that if i use the Windows 8 Pro Auto Repair it can read it fine right after. I wonder what the deal is.
 
have had an m4 on the 10g firmware for a month now in a laptop. no issues and im in the bios all the time. its been nothing but solid and its pretty fast. not as fast as my corsair gtx but its still no slouch.
 
I was reading the official forums today, and hopefully there is an "H" firmware on the way soon (010H? 020H?) because the C400 drive got the update already. Delayed my SSD purchase just because of the whole 010G thing. H is supposed to fix two things, sata cable disappear at boot, and corruption (!) on power-down.
 
I just updated my M4 to the newest firmware 070H, after they said it was recommended. The update went ok but upon recovery from sleep mode and hardware reboot the drive is dead. The motherboard fails to even detected it as connected.

Did you OP have a good experience with their RMA process?
 
try just disconnecting it for a few minutes

I have had this happen
 
Castaa said:
I just updated my M4 to the newest firmware 070H, after they said it was recommended. The update went ok but upon recovery from sleep mode and hardware reboot the drive is dead. The motherboard fails to even detected it as connected.

Did you OP have a good experience with their RMA process?
Click to expand...

Crucial has a great RMA process from what I've used of them.

This thread is older as well, but the old adage "If it aint broke, dont fix it" comes to mind a lot after reading through it.

I'm still running 000F and I'm not having any problems.
 
When i updated my M4 256gb to the latest firmware i thought i bricked it too.

didnt show up in bios after i flashed it, So i updated my bios and magically everything was fine after that

appearantly my Gigabyte z77-ud5h had one of the oldest bios versions it could have:eek:
 
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