FYI, SSD failure can lead to boot issues...

[Dave Burton]

As title, had an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD drive fail on me today, during use. Symptoms were a hard lock, then a boot to BIOS, Windows would NOT load and a restore/repair option would not work.

Only clue was in the HDD BIOS area, the drive was intermittent; Sometimes it would show, others not. Thankfully, I had a "spare" in a laptop and after a Windows re-install it's all good.

Tried the failing SSD in an external USB enclosure, which resulted in the controller emitting a "bit of magic smoke" and then it died, so I assume something created a short inside the SSD. Raised a support ticket with OCZ/Toshiba, can only pray.

This is more of a heads up for people with random boot/POST issues, to make sure you unplug hard drives, it's not always mobo/ram/cpu causing boot issues.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone, fun times to be had in the Boxing Day sales!!!!

DB

Edit: drunk spellings!!!

 

[LuckyBenski]

Personally I'd point at drives before hardware, assuming nothing was obviously totally dead! Sadly with SSDs there's little chance of recovery unlike dying hard drives

 

[WantoN]

Personally I'd point at drives before hardware, assuming nothing was obviously totally dead! Sadly with SSDs there's little chance of recovery unlike dying hard drives

This is why I have a pretty hefty backup scheme; I’m quite paranoid about data loss and downtime.

Not enough people are aware that SSD failure can be much more sudden than with HDDs. And far too few people maintain proper backups.