Samsung 870 EVO 4TB failure - recommendations to try & recover?

[DaBadger84]

So, long story short, I installed Samsung Magician to test my SSDs, as I'm going to be upgrading to some newer ones soon, figured I'd test which ones are actually near failure. I had a new 990 Pro 2TB on the way in addition to my new GPU, and was preparing for potentially having to swap out more drives.
Lo & Behold, both my Windows SSD (a 1TB 980 Pro M.2) and my primary game storage SSD (Samsung 870 EVO 4TB in question) were showing bad sectors under Diagnostic Testing & neither will pass SMART Short Self-Test.
I didn't think "Oh I better go ahead & start backing up these drives immediately" because I had parts coming & was going to do said backup AFTER installing the new parts - that was a mistake.

Got the old GPU & cooling loop yanked, I installed my new GPU, got everything wired up temporarily to make sure the GPU & the new M.2 weren't a dud... get in to Windows after making sure temperatures were okay with the new CPU AIO...

And the 4TB SSD is just not there anymore. I immediately go "Surely I knocked a cord lose installing this behemoth of a GPU or something" so I shut down, pull the GPU out, check all the cords... nothing is lose.
Boot back up, start trying to figure out if the drive is DEAD or if something is just acting weird. The drive doesn't show up under My Computer at all, but it does show up under Disk Management, and under Device Manager. Disk Management Shows "Errors", attempt to reactivate/reinitialize the drive does not work.



Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations for things to try before I go the extreme of wiping the drive in an attempt to save it then going for data recovery afterwards, it was a partitioned drive that had 2TB sections, and it had almost 3TBs of games on it (so it's not like I lost anything terribly valueable, but that's a LOT of crap I'd rather no redownload).

Things I've already tried:
Reactivating/reinitializing, Chkdsk doesn't work because it's now showing the drives have letters or are on. DiskPart sees the drive but can't do anything to it.

 

[SPDIF]

It seems something happened with some program on accident or a bad disk.. Partitions that are corrupted or invalid.
Your only solution is to try a recovery program to try to repair files. Most of them are payed program's. If that does not work the only solution is to Secure-Erase the disk, to try to put it back in working state.

The 980PRO showing error's that is one you have to RMA back to Samsung, you have 5 year warranty. If your 870EVO also show error's in Samsung, then you also have to RMA it back to Samsung, there is also 5 year warranty on it.

Can you post a screenshot from the Smart Table of both your SSD? You can use Crystal Disk Info for that, or any other what you like.

I also see a Unallocated space of 16MB on the Games disk, it has a corrupted or invalid partition.

Further i see there is some Dynamic disk, i think you tried out some things to repair, or possible from bad disks.
A dynamic disk is something from mirrored and RAID-5 volumes, spanned and striped volumes. No idea what happened here.
To convert a dynamic disk back to a basic disk, you must delete all volumes and permanently erase all data from the disk. Before proceeding, make sure you back up any data you want to keep.

Currently as i see in the screenshot, everything is messed up.
I see you also have a Samsung QVO SSD installed.

These things also could happen because off; Bad sectors, hard drive issues, bad SATA cable, virus attack, or malware that corrupted the disk data or the partition table.
Improper removal or insertion of the disk that caused the disk to go offline or lose its signature.

It won't be easy and time consuming to fix this. I think it's best to take a backup and reset everything.
But let's see what the Smart Table shows, if bad you should get new disks from Samsung.

If any of these boxes in red are not ZERO, you have bad or degrading drives, and must be replaced ASAP.
Screenshot is also from an 870EVO in good condition.

 

[unwind-protect]

I would boot from a Linux live install (CD or USB stick) to see what that OS'es option on the matter is. Just to see whether it detects this disk.

 

[kapone32]

Isn't there a thread about these drives?

 

[Solaris17]

why is this showing as a dynamic disk? was another disk in the system that was removed? Did you put this disk back in using a different port?

 

[chrcoluk]

I wonder if it was converted to dynamic previously? Microsoft make it every easy to do so, but dynamic disks do have a fair few downsides, one being of course as already pointed out in this thread, its nowhere near as easy to put them back to basic again.

 

[SPDIF]

I think to that it was previously in some sort of raid or striped volume. Bring all to a new PC or swap disks, breaks everything and makes the partitions and volumes corrupt.

Always backup before install all in a new PC or swapping disks out in the system... I keep saying this every day, but... That can be the reason that Samsung Magician can't read the volume or partition.

 

[DaBadger84]

This is the only PC that drive has ever been in, that's how Windows set it up when I setup Windows on the system. I bought the Samsung 4TB new when building the 5950X/X570 setup. All the drives in the system were new when it was built, except the 860 1TB EVO.
There is a thread about reliability issues with this very disk, that's why I was hoping someone could recommend some things to try before I go the 'extreme' route of converting it to a Basic Disk & then attempting data recovery.
I'm not really concerned about the unallocated hogwash on the other drives, that happened when it happened & it's not an issue for me missing 16MB of a drive lol

 

[SPDIF]

No problem, do you see faults in Smart table, can you post this table here please? Then we will know immediately if there is something wrong with the 980 and 870 disk you use.
It begins with an diagnose like the doctor, then we can see here if we can help you. Now we can't say anything yet as we don't have enough information.

With the 860EVO as you say, there never has been problems with them.

 

[Chris_Ramseyer]

Full disclosure, I work for a rival SSD company but this post is from a personal perspective.

I lost a 4TB from this series around 2 years ago full of data. Only some of the data was backed up. The drive was in a notebook but as a secondary drive. I managed to get the drive to work again but was never able to recover the data. The partition table was corrupted.

 

[DaBadger84]

No problem, do you see faults in Smart table, can you post this table here please? Then we will know immediately if there is something wrong with the 980 and 870 disk you use.
It begins with an diagnose like the doctor, then we can see here if we can help you. Now we can't say anything yet as we don't have enough information.

With the 860EVO as you say, there never has been problems with them.

I can't post the SMART Table because Samsung Magician can no longer see the drive, because it's not "active" in Disk Management :-\

 

[K²mix]

Try CrystalDiskInfo.

 

[SPDIF]

I can't post the SMART Table because Samsung Magician can no longer see the drive, because it's not "active" in Disk Management :-\

Yes that is known from Magician, if the volume created is not standard most of the things are greyed out. If it don't find a standard volume, it simply does not see your SSD.
If you don't get anything with other program's, then your only solution will be to Secure Erasing that SSD. Like i told before, it will be very difficult to repair that en very time consuming.

I would take an sector by sector backup from that SSD, then Secure Erasing it. Then that drive should then be usable again. With the backup you can restore anywhere you want, to TRY to get data back of it without any danger to do further damage on that volume. I would restore that image on an normal HDD, so you don't wear out your expensive SSD unnecessary. In the mean time your SSD is ready for use again!