Hi,

I'm a newbie trying to format a Crucial M500 2.5 480GB SDD drive. The drive is a 6Gb/s SATA drive currently connected via a USB port. The drive is recognised and the windows 7 operating system can display its partitions. However, any attempt to delete partitions or format it fails. Happy to wipe all data so tried to use the Low Level Format tool to completely re-format it. However, I get a stream of error messages as follows:

Format Error occurred at offset 0: 23
Format Error occurred at offset 65,536: 23
Format Error occurred at offset 131072: 23
Format Error occurred at offset 196,608: 23
etc.

Can anyone suggest anything or is the drive completely bricked?

Many thanks for any assistance.

I'd try a S.M.A.R.T. secure erase, that should issue a erase command to the NAND and reset the metadata tables. I don't remember the commands off the top of my head but look for sysrescue-cd and smartctl that should point you in the right direction unless there is another equivalent tool.

Specifically you're looking for S.M.A.R.T. secure erase, not LLF or Full/Zero format. Secure Erase is implemented in the FTL for that purpose.

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Recover My Flash Drive

Hi,

Thanks for your input. I took your advice on board and first tried using the Erase Disk Secure Erase facility in Parted Magic. This informed me that the disk doesn't support Secure Mode! So I tried going to the Crucial's website and downloading their tool (Storage Executive). I tried to perform a PSID Revert but that failed with the message:

An encryption error prevented the PSID Revert operation from completing.

Crucial's tool also advised me that the disk firmware was out of date, so I tried to update it. Although the operation reported it was successful, the old firmware version is still there.

So I think my next step is to try to get support from Crucial directly - unless anyone has any other ideas I can try.....