Hey!
I have a friend’s Samsung laptop using Window$ 10 which doesn’t boot into the operating system. I removed the SSD since I tried to repair the start up with no success. I connected it into my Linux machine in order to back up his information, but Manjaro does not recognize it with the file explorer. Furthermore, when I use gsmartcontrol to check its health, it pops up this:
Short INQUIRY response, skip product id
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
A few attempts before it was recognized for just a bit, so I started to back up, but then I couldn’t keep going due to a read error. The fdisk -l command doesn’t show the device listed.
How can I check if the SSD is dying and/or back up its content?
Cables, ports, and connections can lead you astray, mimicking a drive or hardware failure.
If you have a different SATA cable to test this with, you might get lucky.
I would consider the three variables, other than the drive itself: (1) is the connection on the drive and port secure? (2) is the cable itself bad? (3) is the port on the motherboard failing?
Using another SATA cable, the Manjaro file explorer showed the disk, but as soon as I clicked on it, this message appeared:
An error occurred while accessing '222.3 GiB Internal Drive (sdc2)', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sdc2 at /run/media/alejandro/266C17996C1762BB: Unknown error when mounting /dev/sdc2
It seems that the SSD device is dead. I must say that BIOS doesn’t recognize it either.
Sadly, this seems to be the situation. When Windows fails to boot, it sometimes serves as a red herring that there are I/O errors, thus fleeting drive failure. In fact, it’s fortunate when Windows fails to boot, otherwise, it will happily start, meanwhile you are unaware of an imminent drive failure and continue to corrupt your files. Nor will you have the urgency to backup your irreplaceable data (or even verify your existing backups are accessible.)
I don’t know, but I told him already the bad news; it seems that he doesn’t have too much information to be worry about. And thank you @winnie for your help!