Here's a funny one. Working this morning at home on the desktop, and went downstairs to make a coffee. Came back 10 minutes later and the machine was off, with a black screen, and a message about some sort of boot failure, press any key to continue. Tried a couple of recovery options, all of which failed, so pulled the hard drive out and stuck it in a caddy, and had a look on the laptop to see what was going on. Essentially, the hard drive was blank. 240Gb Sandisk SSD drive with all space "unallocated", so no partitions or anything.

 

Running Acronis Recovery on it and it's finding nothing at all.

 

So where's all the file structure and data gone?

Sorry to hear that - sounds like a Windows October update issue.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/10/09/updated-version-of-windows-10-october-2018-update-released-to-windows-insiders/

Doubt very much a W10 update issue AFAIK that related to files held in "user" folders.

I had a Samsung SSD that had similar issues - I could see it and  re-partitioning seemed to work but then formatting failed.  Installed a new drive and it appeared faulty with same symptoms . Solution faulty SATA cable!

You may also be in luck with a warranty claim see https://www.sandisk.co.uk/about/legal/warranty/warranty-table  

 

Samsung have a diagnostic program for SSD faults ( Samsung had issued me with an RMA on the strength of its output) Sandisk may have a similar offering.

Edited 15 October, 20187 yr by peter_k
added info

As a last resort have a look at http://forum.hddguru.com/viewforum.php?f=10 The site also hosts some very useful "storage" utilities such as low level copy of sd cards (backup of VAG sat nav cards??)

Hopefully one of the suggested utilities above will see you good.

 

Unfortunately in my experience when an SSD goes pop it goes totally and with no warning. So although they are fantastic and fast you need to be up on your updates.

They're also much harder to recover from if you get to the point of seeking professional help for lost data. There is a lot more you can do with a spinning disk to try to recover stuff.

 

You don't sound too panicked so I guess you're well backed up and this is more of an inconvenience.

Yeah, it's an inconvenience or perhaps a puzzle. There's nothing vital lost, other than perhaps a load of crap I was just holding for the sake of holding because it was there. All email account details are backed up and no emails are worth losing sleep over, all my bookmarks have gone from Firefox, and I'll need to log in and save passwords again, but I have those saved on my phone. The all important work programs and invoices are all backed up on the network drive and also on my works laptop, so nothing really is spoiling.

 

Still slowly labouring through Acronis Recovery to see if I can locate the lost partition and recover it, but at the speed it's going it looks like it might be a good few days to get to the end. Hey ho.

Had similar and as aspman says- they go quick. This was a Kingston 120GB SSD. First symptom was similar to a faulty/disconnected data cable. At switch on drive empty so I put it down to a W10 problem and set about a re install with xp first. XP said NO.Disc not present. Fortunately PC WORLD did the decent thing and I have all my working data on a separate store hdd backed up occasionally to one I keep on the shelf ,so nothing lost.

Well, disc recovery finds nothing and fails to scan the complete drive before crapping out and restarting. I reckon it just came to end of life.

I had a couple of SAN discs go south. One just stopped completely and the other started throwing up odd errors.