healeydave wrote:

 

Disk Utility repoerts the SSD as 8.4Mb in size (no, thats not a typo) and thinks the drive is unformatted.

 

When you say "that's not a typo", are you referring to the size itself (8.4), or are you referring to the unit symbol?  Mb means megabit, not megabyte.  Previous people in this thread were stating 8MB, which is megabyte.  8.4 megabits is ~1.05 megabytes.  If the drive truly is 8.4 megabits in capacity, that sounds like quite a different issue than what has been reported here.  I'm also surprised Disk Utility would report drive sizes in N-bits, most partitioning utilities use N-bytes.  TL;DR -- 8 megabytes != 8.4 megabits.

The drive is reported as:

8.4 MB (8,388,608 Bytes)

Intel posted an update here: http://communities.intel.com/message/135752

I want to share solution to fix problem with my SSD Intel.
At the next turn on PC, I discovered with dismay that instead of the 80GB Intel SSDSA2M080G2GC became 8MB Intel Postvill. The first step - to update the FirmWare. But FirmWare update utility, when trying to run, persistently informed me that SSD Intel is not found in the system. I had to go to Internet Mega-Mind. After studying the forums on this topic, I used the Intel SSD Toolbox utility in Secure Erase mode. To drive began to revive it took 7 (seven) cycles of Secure Erase. After each cycle PC has rebooted and Toolbox utility runed again. After the 7th cycle began miracles - instead of "Intel Postvill" 8MB was nominally defined as SSDSA2M080G2GC, appeared the serial number and volume of 80GB, but when I try to partition the disk manager crashes I/O error.
At this stage, I updated the firmware from 2CV102HD to 2CV102M3 and again launched Secure Erase. After this,  I/O-error disappeared and drive earned as if nothing had happened.
After recovery SSD while worked for only 30 hours, and I want to believe that the new firmware will help avoid problems.
Features: - to start  Secure Erase mode necessary power disconnect and connect the drive, but under Win 7 after this procedure, the utility failed to initialize the drive - under XP, this problem was not satisfied and therefore treatment perfomed under Win XP.

The 8mb bug occured on my laptop some days ago.

I tried to find out where the 8mb came from and thanks to your post I tried to look for the HPA. The HPA seems to be the source of the reported 8mb, but not the source of the whole bug. After disabling the HPA (using something like "libata.ignorehpa=1" as kernel argument, don't remember exactly), the disk had full capacity again, but I was unable to read any valid data from the SSD. It looked like everything read was zero and the kernel reported a lot I/O errors. I tried it using normal tools (dd) and sg_utils to issue direct ATA commands, with no luck. I finally gave up and did a secure erase, which brought my SSD back to live.

I think the wrongly reported size from the HPA is just a side effect of the actual bug. Fixing the wrongly reported size does not help.

BTW: I'm now a happy user of btrfs with incremental snapshots + rsync. When btrfs send/receive is done, I'll drive a pretty paranoid backup plan

SSD 320 Hardware/Firmware bug still alive!!!

Dear Intel SSD developers, dear Alan,

I have an urgent ask to help me at a data recovery problem of a ssd 320 160GB drive with bad_ctx 8MB problem.

Please forward email to Intel developers like

Program Manager: -Knut Grimsrud         

Architect: -Drew Vogan    

Firmware: -Dan Post               -Jeff Mcvay     -Suhas Nayak            -Rick Mangold  

RTL:            -Jawad Khan             -Sowmiya Jaychandran           

Electrical:     -Randy Webb

I found this names inside Intel ssd update tool  issdfut.exe.

My customers drive is a SSDSA2BW160GB  with FW:0362 has BAD_CTX.

ISN:CVPR135601VH160DGN

SA: G33021-603

PBA:E75402-601

WWN:50015179596837EA

I'mm data recovery expert at datapower.de germany.

How can I recover those types of drive? I have all tools for soldering  flashing/editing the 25b40 eeprom in my office. May be I can then offering data recovery for a lot of customers in europe having same problem in europe. Please contact me by email at thomas.kaltenstadler@datapower.de or phone +49(0)8218109444

I spoke with lots of data recovery friends of mine, but all of them has some unhandled drives with exactly this problem.

Thanks a lot for your help,

Please tell me everything which helps to solve this problem.

Kindest regards, Thomas Kaltenstadler Datapower Germany

I ran into this bug about a month ago with a new SBS 2011 Essential install.  It happened after initiating the SSD Optimizer through the SSD Toolbox (3.0.3).

hardware:

Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCM

Intel 320 160GB (latest firmware from Intel Toolbox 3.0.3)

Note.

I did not attempt data recovery.  Secure erase (using SSD Toolbox under Win 7, desktop board) brought it back to working condition as far as read/write/erase/secure erase goes, but did not put back into production to test or install an OS yet.