HDD GURU FORUMS

Hello there, I'm hoping someone may be able to help with this. This drive was working fine until earlier this week when the computer froze, rebooted and it was no longer detected. What I've noticed is that the hard drive activity LED will dimly flash every second or two with this drive connected. Now I did something nobody would recommend and shorted the two points in the red square in the photo and that sure enough got the drive into what I can only assume is safe mode (2MB capacity, no SMART values of any worth).

I'm just wondering if anyone has ran into this issue with a Phison E12 equipped SSD.

It's a common problem. The firmware has "panicked" or become stuck in the busy state, probably due to degraded NAND.

Those "safe mode" or "ROM mode" shorting points have confirmed that the Phison controller has basic sanity.

If you have a multimeter, we could measure the supply voltages and hope for a missing rail, but otherwise I'm not aware of any DIY solution.

Thanks for responding. I had a hunch that it might have been a firmware panic and that's why I shorted what I thought may have been safe mode PCB pads to see if the controller would do anything.

As for doing multimeter measurements: sure, I can try to. I need to see if I have a motherboard that'll allow me to keep the business side of the drive facing up. The computer this came out or has the controller and such facing down at a very large thermal pad.





I wish rotating disks would come back to relevance

You can use a USB adapter stripped out of it's housing for testing the voltages. Otherwise it's a trip to a pro with PC3000-SSD extended and hope that the loaders are close enough to access data.

Measure the voltages at V1 - V6.

Hey again, I've made those measurements and they are as follows

v1: 0.905V
v2: 1.8v
v3: 1.1v
v4: 1.72v
v6: 3.0v

I couldn't probe v5 as the component on my SSD in that place has no exposed leads

Those voltages seem OK to me.

Just as I was afraid of. Does anybody here feel like taking on this job? It so, what would be your estimates?

Should be a straightforward recovery (if it's going to be possible) for anyone with pc3000. It's hard to beat https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/ on pricing for routine recoveries.