My computer began restarting unexpectedly with black screens and several different errors mentioning corrupted files or drivers. After updating the drivers, it eventually stopped booting and showed a 0x21A fatal error. I can still access the Windows recovery environment, but startup repair, other recovery options, Command Prompt fixes, and even a factory reset have all failed. I managed to copy my important files to another drive, but the system reports that a boot file is corrupt and network recovery cannot connect. I have not yet tried booting from a Windows installation USB. Could the SSD be failing, or is there another repair step worth trying before replacing it?
1 Answer
The combination of repeated corruption errors and a factory reset failing could indicate that the SSD itself is developing bad sectors rather than Windows merely having damaged system files. From the recovery Command Prompt, you can try `chkdsk C: /f /r`. If it reports many bad sectors or cannot repair them, replacing the SSD is the sensible option. Since you have already copied your important files, the safest long-term solution would be installing a fresh copy of Windows on a new SSD. You can create a Windows installation USB on another computer and use that instead of relying on the built-in recovery partition.
I ran CHKDSK and it did not find any problems, so it did not repair anything.