# Solved: SSD is in "Frozen State" - can not Secure Erase??



## paulb100 (Mar 17, 2005)

I have a Samsung 840 120Gb - I have secured erased it before.. I loaded windows from my HDD so I could do it from windows, when I opened Samsung Magician (stupid name for useless program) it said there were a firmware update so I updated it, rebooted etc - now I went to secure erase as I want too completely reinstall windows due to issues and I can not as it says "drive is in a frozen state" - ive done it before from this HDD so it seems the update has screwed it or changed it...the drive works, but i cant secure erase it?

heres what ive tried:

1) unpluggin the Sata cable (as per its instructions) = no joy.

2) unpluggin the Sata cable, turning on, loading windows THEN pluggin it in = nothing happens, no drive appears, there appears to be no "hot swap" options in the BIOS of my Gigabyte H77M-D3H motherboard.

3) killing power to the PC and rebooting = no joy.

4) created a USB version to run at boot = mixed results, it said the same thing "drive is frozen - unplug sata cable for 2 seconds then plug back in" and run it by typing seguio.exe - so I did that but typing the instruction done nothing, so I reboot and this time it went further to erase it but it stopped saying FATAL ERROR!! - so I reboot and tried again and it said the drive was frozen again!!

this has to be the stupidest thing ive experienced, I can not "UNFREEZE" the drive following samsungs instructions, ive read that freezing the drive is done by the OS at boot, so how is it detected as frozen without the OS running??? I just dont understand it - this only happened after updating to latest firmware!!! - so now I can not do a clean install!!

can anyone help with this please?

thanks


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

You may have "bricked" the drive however give this a try.

Boot with parted magic linux;
http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start#.UZaacRVUzf1
Either the cd or flash drive will be fine. Under tools, select erase disk. The next window that opens selects the disk then it gives you options on how to erase. Select internal command. If the disk is locked, PM will give you the option to put the system to sleep; do so. Wake the system and attempt the secure erase. It may work and it may not however right now you have a drive that does not work so it is worth a shot.

*Be sure you select the correct disk. This cannot be undone. As a precaution, pull the pw connector from any other drives.*


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## paulb100 (Mar 17, 2005)

hi, sorry I should have said the drive works fine...I can boot into it and use it etc, its just locked and can not be unlocked?

Iam a bit wary about using 3rd party tools as it may brick the SSD as I have just read of someone else installing the previous update (Dec 2012) and he/she used Parted Magic and bricked the SSD - or something like that..


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

Up to you; do whatever you want. I have secure erased many ssd drives with PM and never had an issue.


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## paulb100 (Mar 17, 2005)

is it necessary to do so before installing windows again? ive read somewhere its not but others have told me it is?

thanks


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

No, it is not necessary however when I do an install on one of my systems with a ssd, I do a secure erase. If the drive's controller throttles the read/write speed of the drive due to excessive read/writes, then the secure erase restores the drive to out of box condition.

When you use an os that does not support TRIM, then the secure erase becomes more important. Since there is no wear leveling from TRIM, the secure erase restores the drive's speed.


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## paulb100 (Mar 17, 2005)

thanks for the info

ive sorted it.. totally my bad!! - it was SATA POWER cable you had to remove, not SATA cable... i didnt read it properly as I was rushing it.. so i removed power cable a few seconds, popped back in and clicked 'erase' and it worked, I think this unfreezes it for 'x' seconds allowing it to work because i had power killed to it and had it out the case etc..

thanks again for the help, much appreciated


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