The wonders of chkdisc

[Arkadia7]

Oh man, I'm so relieved right now. I was able to fix a brand new external SSD drive that somehow got corrupted.
Let me start from the top. I bought a new external ssd drive recently for my new laptop, and it was pretty expensive - 4 TB - and after using it to store a lot of my steam games and other programs for my new computer, then all of a sudden today it said "This drive is corrupted and unreadable". What the heck?

At first, I was thinking maybe because I had been torrenting stuff recently (for the first time on my new computer) but it was just a couple of movies, and I always use a VPN and scan the files for viruses before opening them. So I don't know how downloading a torrent from the most well known and safe torrent site around, and how it could have corrupted my external drive. But then maybe I was thinking it was because I loaded an old edition of Quicken (2008) to the drive that isn't compatible with windows 11, and then when I plugged it in to my laptop, I noticed the quicken program disappeared off the external drive. So maybe that messed up the drive? I then tried using the drive on my old laptop - nope, same message, the drive is "unreadable and corrupt". Uh-oh. And then there were no options to check errors when I right clicked on it neither.

I don't know what was wrong, but then I did a search on what to do, and somehow was lucky enough to find an awesome article written by a tech expert guy, and they said the first thing you should do is run chkdisc on the external drive. I had no idea you can run chkdisc on an external ssd drive, did you? This is news to me. Anyway, it worked like a charm, and right after it started checking, it said "Deleting corrupt attribute record" and then later it also said,
"Correcting errors in the Master File Table (MFT) mirror.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) DATA attribute.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. No further action is required."

And it was very quick too, like maybe one minute to fix the drive. I was amazed. And I didn't have to reboot or anything, all my files were back, and the drive is working normally! Saved me a bunch of hassle (sending the external ssd back to amazon for a refund, buying another one to replace it, downloading all my files again that were on the drive, etc.) Whew!

 

[Couchpotato]

Sounds more like you bought a defective SSD which is known to happen. I've bought a few SSDs that have burnt out/corrupted in a week or a few months after using them.

 

[Arkadia7]

Sounds more like you bought a defective SSD which is known to happen. I've bought a few SSDs that have burnt out/corrupted in a week or a few months after using them.

Oh no, no no no, don't say it! I hope this was a temporary error, and I am going to be very gentle now on this drive. No more moving it around constantly plugging it in to my old laptop then moving it to my new laptop, plugging it in, etc. I am just going to use it only on my new laptop, and put it behind the screen, and leave it alone, in terms of not moving it any more!

I hope this doesn't happen again. It's a good brand - Samsung.

 

[Couchpotato]

Samsung are very good and worth the price but recently a few of their models have been known to have problems. I believe it was the 870 and 980 Evo versions.

View: https://youtu.be/4DbJq7IpuRw

 

[Arkadia7]

Samsung are very good and worth the price but recently a few of their models have been known to have problems. I believe it was the 870 and 980 Evo versions.

View: https://youtu.be/4DbJq7IpuRw

Yea, I just read some reviews on amazon. Most love the drive, but a couple reviews were warning that the drive can disconnect due to faulty cables that are included with it, and corrupt your files.

So I might have to buy a new high end cable for it, and use that, if it happens again. Luckily it allows for that (some drives come with their own cable that you can't detach)

 

[SpoonFULL]

I remember we used to use checkdisc (or chkdsk) in dos and in Win95-98 when problems arise, and Windows use to run it. Did not know that it is still the case in the new Window versions - its good to know.

SSDs tend to be robust and you can move them around as they don't have moving parts inside them.

 

[Carnifex]

Yikes, I just hope you had a bit of bad luck and that the cable solves the issue. I've only owned two ssd's to date and I guess I have been fortunate so far, no issues yet.

 

[Robollix]

Used to be (not so sure nowadays), but you could make problems for yourself by unplugging a USB device without waiting for the "Safely remove hardware etc." prompt from Windows.

 

[Stingray]

Used to be (not so sure nowadays), but you could make problems for yourself by unplugging a USB device without waiting for the "Safely remove hardware etc." prompt from Windows.

As of a few years ago (2018?), Windows disables write caching for external disks by default, so unless you've overriden that and turned it back on, it's supposed to be safe to remove them anytime, unless you are literally in the middle of writing something to it.

Windows default media removal policy - Windows Client Management

In Windows 10 and later, the default removal policy for external storage media changed from Better performance to Quick removal.

learn.microsoft.com

I remember we used to use checkdisc (or chkdsk) in dos and in Win95-98 when problems arise, and Windows use to run it. Did not know that it is still the case in the new Window versions - its good to know.

CHKDSK isn't normally necessary on internal disks these days because they are all formatted with NTFS which is a journaling filesystem, meaning it can quickly and easily fix issues when the system comes up, in theory without ever having to run a full check with CHKDSK. On the consumer line of Windows, NTFS came about with Windows XP, so most people shouldn't haven't had to think about CHKDSK much in >20 years.

However, if you have a device formatted with FAT (USB flash sticks usually come this way, and other external disks as well) then CHKDSK can be needed sometimes. For a big external disk with critical files on it, you may be better off reformatting it to NTFS for better data integrity.

 

[notdart]

I remember we used to use checkdisc (or chkdsk) in dos and in Win95-98 when problems arise, and Windows use to run it. Did not know that it is still the case in the new Window versions - its good to know.

SSDs tend to be robust and you can move them around as they don't have moving parts inside them.

Not to depress you but this is not totally true; for examine wd extreme pro has a design flaw where many of those ssd are 'break'ing in a rather short period of time - less than a year i think with total data loss; hp had a flaw in the firmware where on a certain date (2 or 3 years out from when they were sold) they would total freeze and all data would be loss - they issued a fix but the fix would only work if you installed it before they locked up.

So far samsung has been rock solid but having said that i've probably cursed them

Having said this i use zfs on linux and two different brands of ssd - i'll get an email alert if one fails ! However - as @Stingray noted windows by default does use a journaling filesystem - took them long enough to get there; now if they had a file system will snapshots....

 

[Stingray]

now if they had a file system will snapshots....

They kind of do with VSS, right?

 

[notdart]

They kind of do with VSS, right?

To be honest i don't know a thing about vss; i've always been a unix guy and only have windows for playing games. If games came out on linux (well the games i want to play) i would never have bothered to get a window system.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Sounds more like you bought a defective SSD which is known to happen. I've bought a few SSDs that have burnt out/corrupted in a week or a few months after using them.

Actually, the newest cpmputing magazine I have here has an article about defective SSDs, with the glue-ing material (I have no proper words for that, perhaps "tin solder" ?) being too weak, this/thus making capacitors or other pieces lose their places too often.

Links from that article :

Firmware Updates for SanDisk & WD Portable SSDs

Instructions to update your SanDisk & WD Portable SSD storage device. Follow these steps to update the firmware on SanDisk Extreme V2, Extreme Pro V2, and WD My Passport.

support-en.wd.com

Extreme Portable SSD

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