Mysterious SSD

[MagicalDuck]

I bought a PC from a random person, and he gave me an SSD which apparently "isn't working for him", for free. I plugged it in, it seems fine, it even launches windows, and works without issues.

I even tested it out with HDD Sentinel, it's at 100% health and performance, and no errors at all.

The SSD I got is Patriot Burst 240GB, it's a sata3 SSD.

Now, when I tried to re-install windows onto it, I got an error that the SSD is in MBR, and it should be in GPT. So I googled how to do it, shift + F10 to open console, diskpart, select disk, clean, convert gpt - and after all of this, it gives me Virtual Disk Service error. Then I tried to plug it in as an external drive to my laptop, to manually format it, and it formats sucessfuly - untill I add a letter again, and all the files are back. Then I tried Disk Management from windows, tried to delete volume, format drive, and it never becomes unallocated. It only loses it's information, it's still filled with files, but it no longer even registers that it's NTFS. After I unplug it, and plug it back again, everything is there once again. After that I tried various applications as AOMEI partition assistant, and I tried to convert from MBR to GPT there, and I get an error code 6, which didn't lead to anywhere when I googled it. Then I tried to wipe entirely the entire disk using the same application, and it went into preOS mode, it slowly but surely deleted everything, yet once back into windows, all the files were still there. Then I just selected everything inside the drive, and just pressed delete - most of the stuff got deleted, but once I hit refresh, everything was once again back.

I even thought that it might be read-only SSD, and I disabled all attributes for that. I've probably spent over 3 hours in CMD alone, trying so so many commands, usually most of the stuff comes out sucessfuly, but nothing changes.

So, does anyone know what could be an issue, if various applications that test the SSD say it's totally fine and working normally, yet it obviously isn't? What's weird, that after doing all this messing around, it still boots into windows fine, yet there's a password on the account, so I can't really do anything while being booted on that actual SSD into windows.

[Tristerin]

My advice, get a Linux distro and wipe the drive through that.  Its free and can run off a USB (Manjaro, or XDE is what I use) drive as an OS.  Then use Linux to wipe that drive/reformat.

 

Real deal, I wonder if there is a virus on it, and its the reason this is happening, and you may want to check your system.  

Using Linux, the virus wont matter.

[AbydosOne]

24 minutes ago, Edvisss said:

So, does anyone know what could be an issue

I've heard that some SSD controllers will intentionally drop to read-only if they encounter some sort of fatal issue (possibly no remaining blocks to reallocate bad blocks to) as a safety measure to ensure the contents can be recovered. It's unlikely there's a way around that (intentionally), and seeing as you can literally get 240GB SATA SSDs for free these days (see Microcenter) (or at least, they're like $20), I wouldn't spend any more time on it.

[Darkwing Drex]

Do a BIOS format and wipe the drive. You should be able to use it, but you'll lose all the data and OS. Just create a new partition when you get back into it. Still 240GB SSDs are pretty cheap, I wouldn't worry much about it.

[LWM723]

It's toast. It's in read-only mode.