A SATA SSD vanished from the BIOS after a power blip — revived through the controller and imaged.
A business Lenovo desktop lost power without warning, and afterwards its SATA SSD no longer showed up in the BIOS. Solid-state drives are especially vulnerable to a sudden loss of power part-way through a write, and when it happens the controller — the chip that runs the drive — can latch into a fault state that hides the drive completely, even though the flash memory holding the data is intact. To the computer, the drive has simply vanished.
On our equipment the drive wouldn't present normally — consistent with a controller fault triggered by the power loss rather than worn-out flash. That distinction matters: it's a recoverable condition, because the data underneath is untouched and the controller's internal tables just need putting back into a consistent state.
Using the PC3000 we reached the SSD's controller in its technical mode, cleared the fault condition and checked the integrity of its internal translation tables — the structures that map the logical drive onto the physical flash — repairing the inconsistencies the abrupt power loss had left. With the controller answering again the logical drive reappeared, and we imaged it to a copy. Power-loss faults on SSDs are common, and clearing them is delicate work that has to happen at the controller level, not through the normal interface.
From the image we rebuilt the file system, checked the business's data opened correctly, and wrote it all to fresh media.
The file system mounted just as it had been, and all of the business's data was returned four working days later. The takeaway is that solid-state drives, for all their speed and reliability, don't like sudden power cuts — an uninterruptible power supply on an important machine is cheap insurance against exactly this failure.
PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
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Yes — from failed drives recovered in our clean-air environment through to logical faults like a corrupt partition table rebuilt off an image. The original drive is never written to.
From £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed quote before any work starts.
Don't format it, and stop using the PC. The data is usually still intact; it's the formatting, or carrying on using the machine, that risks losing it.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.