I was cloning my current smaller boot drive to a larger SSD with DiskGenius. The process appeared to be working, but then it stopped with an error saying the destination SSD no longer existed. The drive was never moved, and I checked the connections and tried another cable. Windows Disk Management now shows it as Unknown, Not Initialized, with no usable capacity. DiskPart lists it as 0 B, and running clean makes it disappear entirely. Is the SSD dead, or is there anything else I should try?
3 Answers
Cooling could contribute to a failure during a long clone, especially for an unheatsinked NVMe drive, but temperature alone would not normally explain a permanent 0-byte device. Let it cool completely, reconnect it directly if possible, and check whether the manufacturer's utility detects it. If it still reports no capacity, replace it.
If this was an external SSD or came in an enclosure, there is another possibility: counterfeit drives sometimes report a fake large capacity but contain much less storage. They appear to work until enough data is copied, then fail. Check the drive's actual model and test it with a capacity-testing tool, but a brand-new drive that suddenly reports 0 bytes should generally be returned rather than trusted.
That strongly points to a hardware failure. If DiskPart sees the device but reports 0 bytes, the SSD's controller or flash storage is likely no longer reporting its capacity. You can check it with CrystalDiskInfo, but I would stop trying to initialize or write to it and return or RMA the drive.
Exactly—when the operating system is getting a 0-byte capacity from the drive itself, changing partitions or running clean usually cannot fix it.