New SSD Drive makes me sad

jose melendez

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Oct 23, 2003
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As suggested here, I got a new Samsung EVO 850 SSD drive and some new RAM. I installed them to day and all looks good. The RAM is acknowledged and disk utility sees the disk. All that's left is to format it and then I can clone from the external drive I've been using to the new EVO, right? Wrong.

I can't format the disk. I keep getting the message "File system formatter failed" I successfully formatted it as a DOS disk, but I've tried everything I can think of and read of (running disk repair, using a terminal command to try to format and no luck.) I've read with an external SATA to USB it might work, but I don't have one and it will take a while to get one here.

Any ideas for work arounds?
 

jayhoz

Ronald Bartel
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Jul 19, 2005
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How are you trying to format the drive? Via Disk Management or some other method?
 

Harry Hooper

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What software did you use to write the disk image onto the external drive? That software should be used to restore the image (formatting will be handled automatically in the process).
 

GregHarris

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Jun 5, 2008
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That would make me very nervous. SSD drives are a wonderful but still fairly new gadget in the consumer world (although the tech has been around for 20 years). Reliability is not quite there yet. I've installed 4 of them on my home systems and have had two failures, one requiring a return (Critical brand) and one corruption due to a power flicker/outage (Sandisk). That's what I get for not having it on an APC. I had to wipe and reinstall the latter. Apparently the power outage caused the drive to partition itself spontaneously. I'd recommend having a good backup plan.
 

jose melendez

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I've got all my files backed up on mozy and a clone on a 2 TB external, which I will probably start using for Time Machine backups. I am pretty fucking paranoid.


And... just like that I get failed to Erase disk from superduper... grrr
 

jose melendez

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Ok here's a new wrinkle. When I go into disk utility and try to erase, when I go to the disk name 500.11 Samsung etc. and erase I get an error message. When I go to disk0s2, which I guess it sees as a partion, it lets me erase. Not making a lot of sense here.
 

jose melendez

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And now it's working. I erased the partion that was on there, reformated the drive, for some reason it worked this time and for some reason SuperDuper erased and got on its way.

So freaking weird.
 

mwonow

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Sep 4, 2005
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That drive does not sound like a trustworthy location for your data!

And fwiw, restores are a lot trickier from SSDs than from rotating magnetic disks, so a Mozy backup is a very good idea...
 

jose melendez

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Another thought as I try to diagnose this, when the disk is mounted, data transfers super super slow. to the new SSD. My old HD was also super slow? Does that point to a cable problem?
 

jose melendez

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Thought I'd let you know how this all worked out. I replaced the internal SATA cable and everything now works fine. It took me three weeks to get the cable, but the machine works like a charm now.