Intel G3 SSD fail to boot (recovery CD?)

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VulcaN

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 22, 2001
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Intel 160GB G3- Shut down my pc by holding in the power button last night, know its bad karma but last time I had an issue with something like this was in the intel pentium days, and I thought that was because of the moving parts in the drives.

This morning I get the cannot find system disk error and think great now I have to repair / possibly reinstall windows, but the disk (visible to the motherboard bios) is not even visible to the OS install / repair.

Is there some kind of intel toolkit that I can boot into and analyze the disk? All the links I can find point to their windows based toolkit. If I boot into another install of windows to analyze the disk, something tells me that will not work since the OS cant see the disk.
 
You have probably been bitten by the infamous Intel 320 8MB bug. There is a thread about it here, and on Intel's forums.

Does the SSD show up in the BIOS during POST? If so, is it shown as only 8MB capacity?

Some people have had success with secure erasing the SSD to get it back to full capacity. Obviously, you lose all your data. parted magic is a good tool for SE:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...d-Click-Method&p=578170&viewfull=1#post578170

If SE does not work, you can RMA the SSD or wait for Intel's firmware update (no guarantee that will fix an already borked SSD)
 
ahhh yes it is showing 8MB capacity lol... what causes this? Was it my fault by improperly shutting down or would this have happened regardless??
Man and my 80GB g2 was working fine. I only upgraded to the 320 series because I thought my OS / data would be safer !
 
It is a now well-known bug in the firmware of the Intel 320 series. Many people have had the problem. Just google "8MB bug Intel 320 SSD" for more information, or look for the thread about it in this forum.

It is not your fault. My best guess is that there is a probability of between 0.01% and 1% that the bug will occur for every "unsafe" shutdown to the SSD. Note that unsafe shutdown means that the power to the SSD was cut before the SSD received the ATA command to shutdown. That can happen if you cut the power to the computer suddenly, but there are also cases where sleep or hibernation can result in an unsafe shutdown due to the power being cut too quickly without the SSD being able to react to the shutdown command (or not sending it at all).
 
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This just happened to me with my MacBook and an Intel 320 160GB drive. I was installing Windows 7 via Parallels and I noticed the beach ball came up and I could not do anything else. I powered the system down by holding the power button down and as soon as I tried to bring the system back up, it was dead. I removed the drive, connected it to my regular bench and it was not recognized at all.

Crappy thing for me is the drive is just dead. It's not seen by any BIOS. It actually locks the system up from completing the boot process lol.
 
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So computurd, are you still saying this is a rare issue? :p
 
o computurd, are you still saying this is a rare issue?
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I removed the drive, connected it to my regular bench and it was not recognized at all.
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Crappy thing for me is the drive is just dead. It's not seen by any BIOS. It actually locks the system up from completing the boot process lol.
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this isnt indicative of the 8mb bug. it shows up in the bios if it is the bug as 8mb. pay attention :) this isnt it. there could be a few reasons for this behavior, from SSD to mobo to PSU.

one other post that i have seen outside of the initial ones made at intel, what, two months ago? how long ago was it?
hardly the stuff of mass recalls and people running for the hills. It is unfortunate and i feel for Vulcan, but yes, one post outside of Intels ONE THREAD with a few users is the very definition of rare.

rare/re(ə)r/Adjective
1. (of an event, situation, or condition) Not occurring very often.
2. (of a thing) Not found in large numbers and consequently of interest or value.
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RARE Def

I am not going to debate in a thread intended to help Vulcan though. That is poor form.
 
I'm set now, just waiting for the firmware fix. After running the bootable partitioning linux distro John linked above, I was able to reset the serial / model number to default and then format the drive in windows. It sucks to lose all your data though! I didn’t back it up because it was just my OS, games, etc drive (all important data is on a raid array) but I still had to go through the trouble of re-downloading everything and tracking stuff down!

I have gone back to my G2 80GB drive as an OS drive just so while I'm waiting for the firmware fix it does happen again. I don’t think I will take the effort to switch my OS back to the G3 drive when the fix hits however, unless someone thinks the G3 is worth the trouble. I didn’t notice any performance improvements but then again I wasn’t expecting to see any outside of benchmarks, I just thought it was more reliable.

It does seem like a rather rare problem, im sure it would be widespread if it occured on NORMAL shutdowns and not just emergency stops, but you have to wonder how many people this has happend to that didnt post about it on a forum and just sent the drive back to intel cursing up a storm.

I wonder if any manufactures put these drives in their laptops yet? I know all my non-technical friends power off their laptops the hard way quite often.
 
The G3 should be more reliable than the G2 drive considering that the G3 has the additional capacitors to prevent data corruption/loss in case of a sudden power outage (ironic I know...). So once the firmware fix is available, I would suggest you consider moving everything back to the G3...
 
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