X-25M Erasing Itself

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okashira

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 7, 2005
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I seem to be having a problem with my X-25M G2 suddenly losing the contents of the drive.

It always happens on a return from standby or cold boot. If from a return from standby, windows will lock up on the "logging in," and the system will be unresponsive. Upon reboot, the system will return "insert boot disk to selectied drive".... etc.

Inspection with win7 install disk shows NO partitions, nothing. Even the 100mb partition will be GONE.

I can then install win7 again, and the drive will work fine. I can reboot, standby, power off, and it will be fine.

then, randomly, the drive will suddenly erase itself on next power on.

Any ideas?

note: This happened before AND after the TRIM firmware.
 
So it happened again. I was downloading headers in Newsbin on a fresh win7 install (195 megabit, thanks header compression and 18mbit UVERSE) and my machine hard froze. I was using what I considered a safe overclock. (had installed win7 this way, 150 runs of LinX at 3200MB problem size, etc.)

I reset and bam, everything was gone.

I'm going to have to rule out overclock instability as the cause of this, but this would be the first time in 15 years of overclocking that I've heard of system instability resulting in dataloss of this magnitude.
 
How bizarre. It sounds like physical data corruption to me. I'd RMA the SSD.
 
Owww....pain. Turn off the overclocking and see if it is happening again. Can you switch to another hard drive for primary to see if the same problem happens?
 
I never heard of his problem before. If you buy a X25-M and don't flash it, it'll be fine.
 
Oh, this happened before the TRIM firmware flash, too.

This exact same machine has used a 500gb seagate, a 640gb WD Blue, and a 640gb WD blue RAID array as the boot drive, and I've never seen this.

However, I have updated my BIOS (Rampage Formula) recently. also, it hasn't been overclocked much until recently. (owned board and CPU for 1.5 yr)
 
nubbin77 said:
oh man, all these x25-m stories make me scared to have just bought one.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong. The X-25M's performance is what got me dicking around with my computer again in the first place. In fact, the reduction in bottleneck provided by the SSD prompted me to overclock again and the effects of the overclock are more noticeable in use as a result.
 
okashira said:
Oh, this happened before the TRIM firmware flash, too
Click to expand...
Yes, I saw that, that's why I said it was physical corruption and suggested RMAing it. I was replying to nubbin. Your problem isn't common; if he were to buy a X25-M and not flash it, he would likely be happy with his purchase.
 
More lessons learned.

Windows 7 setup will not create the 100mb recovery partition on a blank drive if I disable my overclock in the bios and turn back on speedstep, etc. How bizarre is that??

the SSD would lose its data every time if I recovered to a win7 created 75 gb partition and had TrueImage resize to make it the 100mb partition, then create the main partition. Doing this, at first reboot, the system will freeze at ACHI detection of the X-25M. Have to physically power off. Upon power on, data is gone, every time.

I am now running with 0 overclock (down from ~3.5ghz to 2.66) to see if it will happen again. I had to re-enable my overclock to get Win7 to create the partitions right temporarily, though, lol.

However, after poking around Intel forum, I'm starting to think I just have the TRIM firmware issue everyone else has, just without the SMART errors.
 
If you're going around reinstalling windows anyway, why not just RMA the drive? Why take the chance?
 
I will certaintly be RMAing it now. Drive died again on poweroff/power on.

The "chance" I did not want to take was RMAing the drive only to recieve another that does the same thing due to a problem with my system.

it seems clear now that I just have the same issue as everyone else, except no SMART errors.
 
Doesn't look like the same issue to me at all; you had the problem before installing the new firmware and other people are getting totally borked drives that can't be used at all without a secure erase. But your drive is clearly screwed up and should be replaced regardless.
 
update:

problem was fixed by not letting windows 7 installer partition the drive. I actually booted the win7 installer, and partitioned using diskpart; creating a 100mb partition to match whats created by windows, with a 512k offset, and then a full partition. rebooted and restored with trueimage. used it extensivly and the drive no longer dies.
 
Wow that was one bizarre case.
You should post that on Intel community forum, and see what they make of it.

Glad you worked it out. I hope I don't get into any such issues. Haven't even gotten to the overclocking part myself:D
 
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