Intel 40GB 320 Firmware update and 8MB glitch

[MSlig]

Today I woke up to see my computer in a stuck hibernation mode and had to force shut it down, it comes back with the 8MB BAD serial glitch, I ran through the process in a linux recovery environment and brought the drive back, after messing with the drive to get it out of a frozen security state as well.

anyway with it back the bootable firmware update wont see the drive, and I get the lame message about the Toolbox having trouble communicating with my drive, because I have an Nvidia SATA controller I guess.

but the toolbox states I have firmware 4PC1 firmware... the most recent?! Wasn't this supposed to be fixed by firmware update? should I trust what the toolbox is saying?

Not a couple days ago I ran the SSDhealth tester and it said I had about a 99% health with about 8 years life left, although I am sure thats a representation of read/writes, but I mean the drive hasn't been used much..

[SCant1]

PseudoKirby wrote:

Today I woke up to see my computer in a stuck hibernation mode and had to force shut it down, it comes back with the 8MB BAD serial glitch, I ran through the process in a linux recovery environment and brought the drive back, after messing with the drive to get it out of a frozen security state as well.

Could you tell me what Linux process you used to bring your SSD back to life - and whether you were able to recover any data?? I'm dead in the water with a month-old backup, and pretty miserable.

My story is very similar to many others I've read here. My computer froze solid (while I was making an online purchase), and the only way to get out of it was to force a power down. When I turned it on again, I had an invalid partition table, and my 160GB Intel 320 series SSD was being reported by the system as 8MB with an invalid partition table. After several days of trying (unsuccessfully) everything I could think of to get the data of it - including booting to a Linux/Ubuntu Live CD - I stumbled upon an article about the Intel 320 series firmware bug. Ugh. (When I looked at it with a hex editor, I saw it was almost all zeros - but my mind won't accept that.)

After much pain, I finally figured out how to make one of my spare SATA hard drives boot externally while plugged into a USB slot via an adapter. That allowed me to keep the damaged SSD in the internal SATA port so I could use the Intel SSD Toolbox. I didn't get very far, though, because there is a security freeze lock on the drive, and nothing I've tried can turn it off. I've hot (re)plugged the SSD, disabled/enabled the SSD driver, hibernated the computer ("sleep" is disabled because my notebook's native video driver isn't installed) - nothing works. I'm not that keen on doing a secure erase, anyway, because then there's no hope whatsoever of recovering any data. I want there to be another way to restore the drive to health.

And then I saw your cavalier statement that you'd gotten your disk back up and running and resolved the lock problem. How???? Did you recover any of your data? If so, double-how????

I've been very dismayed to see all the recent, post-firmware-update reports of new 8MB firmware bug crashes - i.e. the bug hasn't been fixed. I already would never again use an SSD as the main drive on my work computer, but if the Intel 320 series is that unreliable, I don't want to use it at all for anything. Why put myself through the grief? This hasn't been a good experience.

Also, the error message I'm getting is slightly different from that in the Intel announcement. I have BAD_CTX, but not 13. The number is 00000159. So I'm not at all sure the problem I'm seeing is fixed by the latest firmware.

Any thoughts, insights, help, or clarity anyone here can offer me would be greatly appreciated. I've been struggling with this for a week now, and I'm exhausted.

Thanks in advance.

[MSlig]

I did not recover any data, luckily the drive was a fairly new install and only 40GB so I kept nothing on it but the OS. I used Parted Magic booted from Hirens Boot CD, but its also on Ultimate Boot CD. EraseHDD also works, it has to be a Secure Erase, one that uses a manufacturers feature to clean the drive.

and the ONLY case I have heard of to recover data was this company Gillware stated that they can recover the data on the drives.