Windows Update Bricked my system!

[Johnmakuta]

I was shutting down my PC on Tuesday and it said "Shut down and Update". Then on Wednesday when I turned it on it had a percentage going that got to 100 saying it was updating then it went black and got the blue circle that kept swirling. That thing kept swirling for 2 hours before I turned it off. Now of course it isn't working. I tried using a Windows boot USB to troubleshoot but it said the drive was locked but when I went into command prompt and did what is usually suggested {something like chkhsk....c:} it still said the drive was locked. I decided to go in and just try to reinstall windows but I keep getting this error that even when typed into google nothing shows up. The error was error 0xb9f61160. I am really worried my drive might have died because it doesn't seem to respond to anything. I can't reformat it, I can't at partitions, etc. It's a Samsung 950 Pro 256 GB. 

 

Please help!

[vorticalbox]

does it show in the bios? If so its probably fine. Have you tried using a linux live CD to access the drive? If you don't have anything of value then I would just nuke it with gparted.

[zMeul]

it's possible the SSD is toasted - especially since you say you can't access the partitions on it

[AresKrieger]

Whether it be a drive failure or microsoft bricking the drive your likely going to have to replace it, but if it shows up in the bios the I'd say it likely not completely dead just rendered useless by software corruption

[kirashi]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

it's possible the SSD is toasted - especially since you say you can't access the partitions on it

Hopefully not - most SSD's have a secure erase function that will obliterate anything on the drive, data, partitions, and all.

From your bootable Windows USB, run command prompt and enter the following commands:

PLEASE NOTE: I RECOMMEND REMOVING ALL OTHER DRIVES FOR THIS PROCESS.

 

>diskpart

>lis dis

>sel dis #

>clean

>cre par pri

>exit

>exit

 

This will list your disks, select your disk number (should correspond to the 256GB Samsung drive), clean it (wipes out all partitions), creates a new primary partition, and exits command prompt. Then you should be able to reinstall your Windows fine. If not, you'll need to figure out how to initiate Samsung's SSD secure erase functionality.

[WkdPaul]

-moved to troubleshooting-

[demonix00]

I'd suggest downloading something like gparted which might be able to remove the lock on the hard drive and allow the erasure of the drive.