I got a surprise yesterday - PC wouldn't start up, couldn't find winload. I tried a bunch of solutions, including going into Command Prompt and seeing what was wrong. It not only couldn't find winload, it couldn't find the drive at all. The drive was recognized in the BIOS, but not in command prompt. The drive in question is a SanDisk U100 SSD.
So today I went out, bought a new hard drive to load Windows onto to see if I could figure this out. Here is what I found:
In Windows Explorer, the drive doesn't show up at all.
In device manager, the drive shows up and is listed as "working properly." No updates to the driver are available.
In Disk Management, the drive is listed as unallocated space, but it is not initialized, so I can't set a volume for it (all options other than "help" and "initialize" are greyed out - help didn't help, and if I try to initialize the drive, I get a "The drive cannot find sector requested" error message).
According to the SanDisk SSD Toolkit, it passes the SMART, the firmware is up to date, and it recognizes all of its properties.
If it couldn't be recognized by anything, or it was listed as some degree of broken other than "working properly," I'd be sure this was a bust and spend the rest of the night redownloading my Steam games, but if it still works, and there's some way to get it back up and running, that'd be a lot easier for me. Any suggestions?
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Had a similar issue and it turns out my cable had wiggled its way loose. Granted, it was imperceptible to a scanning electron microscope, but reseating the cable fixed the issue.