I'm in a bit of a panic here with my Samsung V-NAND SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB, which was previously my Windows OS drive. After swapping my PC components into a new case, I encountered a blue screen upon booting. When I checked the BIOS, the drive showed as 0.00 GB in the NVMe configuration. In the Windows recovery environment, diskpart indicated that the SSD appears as Disk 2 but only shows ~1GB of space. I tried cleaning and converting it with diskpart, but that didn't work. Disk Management prompted me to initialize the disk, but it still showed only ~1GB. I've also attempted to use Samsung Magician, but no luck there. This SSD was functioning perfectly before the case swap, and I need help with the following: 1) Does seeing 0.00 GB in the BIOS and 1GB in Windows usually indicate that the SSD or its controller has failed? 2) What else can I try before conceding that the drive is dead, such as different M.2 slots or reseating it? 3) If the system only recognizes it as 1GB, what's the best way to attempt data recovery? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
5 Answers
You might want to consider getting an NVMe to USB enclosure for your drive. If it matches your SSD's key type, plug it into a working computer to check if the data is accessible. Sometimes this can help you see the drive partitions too.
If you’re looking at ~1GB, it usually means the SSD is in panic mode, which isn’t a good sign. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do yourself to fix it. Your best bet for data recovery is to send it to a professional, as they have the tools to recover data from drives in this state.
One thing you could try is removing the SSD, starting your PC without it, then shutting it down and reinserting the SSD. After that, power it on again to see if it gets recognized properly.
It's really important to be cautious with data recovery. If possible, create an image of the failing drive before attempting anything. If the data is very important, I would recommend contacting a professional data recovery service.
Dump files from the blue screen might also give you clues about what went wrong. If you can access Windows or Safe Mode, check C:WindowsMinidump for any files. You can zip and upload this data to a file-sharing site for more help.
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