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Help me fix a stupid mistake?

R

RobertoIsRad

n00b
Joined
Jan 29, 2008
Messages
52
I recently was given a used Crucial M4 256 SSD in perfect working order. I plopped it into a external enclosure and starting copying my files onto the new drive. Where I really messed up is for whatever stupid reason as I was leaving for work I thought to myself "I should take my external drive" and unplugged the drive while it was being copied....

UGH

After that mistake my drive wasn't appearing in BIOS anymore. I was able to get it to show up again by power cycling following this guide:

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial...quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215

I then updated the firmware on the drive because apparently that's why it took a crap so easily in the first place.

My problem now is that I can't make any partitions or use anything on the drive, windows and gparted give me IO errors when I try to initialize. Any time Itry a command with hdparm I get an input/output error. I've tried to put the drive in two desktops and a laptop with the same errors occurring. It's well out of warranty so crucial wont take it back. The data on the drive is unimportant and I don't care if it's lost.

Any advice or is the drive trash?

THANKS!
 
Use diskpart in windows and issue a CLEAN command to the drive.

That should hopefully take care of it. If not, it is probably hosed.

Open up an admin command prompt and issue these commands

diskpart
list disk
select disk (whatever number the SSD in question is)
clean

You can also make a partion afterwards if you want with this command and you may need to do so. I have had a few thumb drives (if you use the clean command on a thumb drive, nothing but diskpart that I have found will make a new partition on it) and even HDDs that have something messed up on them and nothing but diskpart has fixed them unless I make a partition with diskpart.

create partition primary
 
diskpart and gparted both give me I/O errors. It seems like it's locked to whatever commands I try and give it from different programs and operating systems. Hdparm says that the drive is not locked and not frozen...
 
Last edited:
RobertoIsRad said:
diskpart and gparted both give me I/O errors. It seems like it's locked to whatever commands I try and give it from different programs and operating systems. Hdparm says that the drive is not locked and not frozen...
Click to expand...

Are you plugging into a real SATA port or still on USB?
 
I've tried it both ways. It's currently connected to a desktop computer with the standard sata+power
 
try updating the firmware again, or downgrading.

If its giving IO errors it means that the drive is not responding to what the PC is telling it to do, the PC can tell it is connected but it won't respond to commands. At this point I would say it is a firmware issue.
 
No dice... I downgraded the firmware and all of the IO problems stayed so then I upgraded again and all of the IO errors stayed the same.
I can't believe how unreliable this thing was, I can accept data loss from pulling it on accident but complete brick? I know what brand I'm going to stay away from in the future
 
I can't believe how unreliable this thing was, I can accept data loss from pulling it on accident but complete brick? I know what brand I'm going to stay away from in the future
Click to expand...

1. You probably corrupted the mapping table on the SSD by pulling the power in mid update.
2. An old drive like this may not have code in the firmware to deal with this type of corruption and did not have the necessary capacitors to prevent it from happening in the first place.
 
Is there any way to force a re-write? The SSD board has very clearly marked JTAG spots. I have an extra raspberry pi and I would love to do something like this http://fmad.io/blog-ssd-bricked-restore.html. Too bad the author of that blog was pretty vague on what he was doing (for someone clueless like me). The hard part is that any google search on JTAG is completely filled with results for modifying an xbox...
 
Not sure if this will help you or not, but here is a site for JTAG Pinouts or possibly here.

It appears to me that the fellow in that interesting blog was very familiar with JTAG since he basically ad-hoc'd a circuit interface so the raspeberry pi could talk to the SSD JTAG.

Then of course there was the assembly language debugging and coding he was familiar with. I guess if you have sufficient skill sets in both the hardware interface and the assembly language coding, then have a good time of it now that you can determine your JTAG pinout format.
 
Thanks for the pin outs. I'm compiling the software now using this guide:

https://github.com/synthetos/PiOCD/wiki/Using-a-Raspberry-Pi-as-a-JTAG-Dongle

Tomorrow I'll buy a JTAG GPIO header or at least some female to female jumper wires. My wife is gone until Saturday... what else am I going to do?

That blog makes it look really complicated because he threw in the bread board. Everything else I've found is just connecting wires directly from the pi to the jtag inputs
 
Progress! ...well sort of... I'll try and connect to the SSD through the Pi later this after noon

The Drive
CVkSIxcl.jpg

The Guts
Lke9E67l.jpg

The Header
8RyqQuAl.jpg

Solder Done
BG9lnWRl.jpg

Ready to try it
RUeeED8l.jpg
 
Well OP, no updates since yesterday.
I guess you have one more day to get this project done before your wife comes home.
 
I can't figure out how to get my Pi to interface.... I'm reading about it but it's kind of over my head. The drive and the raspberry are probably just going to go back into my "drawer of technology".
 
I did see that, thank you. The problem with those instructions and many of the other ones I found is that they're for debugging the Pi itself and not for using the Pi as a debugger. I could be wrong, that's just how I read it
 
 
Two more that may be helpful

Guy uses Pi to unbrick a Linksys WRT54G using JTAG interface

This is a pretty clear wiring diagram, so if the pi has to be pin specific on the GPIO to JTAG interface, this is probably what you needed

and a third one relating to OPENOCD instructions here.
 
CVNet1
Lots of good info. Thanks a lot. If work slows down this is definitely on my hobby list. Well maybe not the unbricking a 256GB M4 (unless one of my M4s brick) but I do have a WRT54G that I am not using...
 
Well friends, let's pour one out for my good friend the raspberry pi... Something I did let out the magic smoke...

It was a good learning experiment though! Thanks everyone for the help!
 
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