A brief power outage seems to have disrupted my computer. Afterward, it stayed on the Gigabyte splash screen, and the built-in Windows recovery options didn't fix the problem. I started a clean Windows 11 installation from a USB drive, but the installer has been stuck at 11% for about three hours. The SSD is older and fairly slow, but previous Windows installations finished much faster. Could the power interruption have corrupted something, and is the SSD likely failing?
2 Answers
A Windows installation on an SSD normally shouldn’t take anywhere near that long. A power loss while the drive was active could have damaged the existing partitions or exposed a problem with the drive. If your firmware has a Secure Erase option, use it on the target SSD, restore BIOS settings to their defaults, and then retry the installation.
The power interruption may have caused filesystem or partition damage. Another possible fix is to delete the existing partitions during Windows Setup and create a new one, rather than installing over the old layout. A full, non-quick format can also take some time, but if the SSD disappears or DiskPart can’t access it, check the drive’s connections and BIOS detection first—the drive or its controller may be failing.
What’s the safest way to delete the old partitions and recreate the drive layout?
My BIOS doesn’t have a Secure Erase option, so I tried using DiskPart’s clean all command instead. It returned “A device which does not exist was specified,” and now the SSD isn’t detected at all. Does that mean it’s failing?