Saturday, January 3, 2015

How to fix Crucial V4 SSD I/O errors

I use a 32GB Crucial V4 SSD for the OS drive of my home theater PC; it's not a great drive but it works.. well, up until today, when an unexpected powerdown corrupted it. I tried to reimage the drive (I use "DD" under linux) but I got a bunch of IO errors writing to the SSD. DOH!  Normally I'd bin the drive and buy another one (hint; not a Crucial drive) but this time I found a fix...

If you re-flash the drive's firmware (using the bootable usb stick image found here ) it cautions in the docs here "!ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!"   ...well, y'know actually that sounds ideal...

And lo! Even though my drive was already running the latest firmware, the tool allows you to reflash it anyway, and bingo - twenty seconds later a completely blank SSD with no hard errors.

Happy new year!

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