Crucial MX500 2.5 SSD Hard Drive - Hard disk 3F0 boot device not found error

[erikdfb]

Hi all,

I'm having an issue with my recently installed MX500 2.5 SSD Hard Drive. I have a HP Pavilion 15-e081sa running on Windows 10 and BIOS F.21. I installed the hard drive a week ago and everything was fine until yesterday. I installed the latest Windows updates and, after a restart the laptop just froze for a couple of hours. That's when I powered it off and after a restart I started getting a Hard disk 3F0 boot device not found error. 

I've tried removing the hard drive, checking the cables and re-installing it to no avail.

I've also replaced the new SSD with my old HDD hard drive to see if there was an issue with the SATA cable but the old HDD hard drive is working normally.

The SSD has a freshly installed Windows 10 and not a clone from my old HDD.

I've contacted Crucial who suggested installing the latest BIOS firmware, but due to the laptop being quite old, there are no updates available on the HP website.

Could you please advise?

Thanks in advance for any help! This is driving me insane 🙂

[tk_srq]

@erikdfb,

the 3F0 error can be triggered by a failed hard drive or damaged boot files, which reside in the efi partition, which is separate from the Windows partition (c:\ drive).  If the error pops out right after Windows update, there's the good possibility that Windows update corrupted the boot system. 

your ssd drive is brand new but I suggest you perform a hard drive diagnostic test to rule out hard drive issues. You can go into F2 Hardware Diagnostic tool and run all available hard drive tests. If the tests turn out ok, then we can check the Windows boot system. 

[erikdfb]

@Tk_srq, thank you very much for your reply! 

I'm unsure if the boot system has been corrupted as I've removed the new SSD  from the laptop and reinstalled my old HDD one and it's working as expected. Windows loads and I can work on it normally (albeit very slowly). I tried to run the F2 Hardware Diagnostic tool but it doesn't recognise the SSD drive.

I've bought a SATA to USB cable to try and see if I could run some diagnostics on the SSD drive to no avail .... Windows can't even recognise it. Something REALLY wrong must have happened that might have crashed the SSD drive. I'm going to get in touch with Crucial again to see if they have something else to recommend. 

In the meantime, I'd like to know if I could update the BIOS version to a more recent one - my laptop is running on F21 and the HP website only offers BIOS compatible with Windows 8 (I'm running Windows 10)

Do you know if that's possible? Don't want to run the risk of making things worse than they already are.

Thank you in advance for any information anyone can provide.

[TzortzisG]

Hi!

erikdfb, Crucial has a guide about their SSDs and "ungraceful shutdowns". It involves power cycling them so that they can rebuild their mapping tables. You should follow it:

CRUCIAL -Why Did my SSD 'Disappear' from my System? 

[erikdfb]

Hi @TzortzisG,

Thanks for your reply. I'd already seen the article and tried the power cycling. I tried it again this weekend to no avail. I've even bought another SATA to USB cable (3.0) to rule out any issues with the one I had (2.0) - Didn't work unfortunately, Windows does not recognise the drive. I've contacted Crucial again today and, apparently, their internal team is investigating the issue which might be due to a faulty SSD drive... Need to wait for a few days now to see what they come back with.

[TzortzisG]

Yes, I agree that it's quite possible the SSD controller died during the sudden power loss. However, in many cases you just have to use the older unabridged version of the power cycling (with a Desktop) and a lot of patience to bring it back to life!

Crucial -BIOS not recognizing Crucial SSD