One thing to know first
Don't let anything repair it. That prompt is the danger, not the fault.
The device is visible, which means the hardware is talking. What has failed is the filesystem, the index describing where each file begins and ends. Your files are almost always still sitting on the media untouched. The damage in this scenario is nearly always self-inflicted afterwards: chkdsk, Disk Utility's First Aid, or a format writes new structures over the damaged ones, and in doing so overwrites the information a recovery would have used to reassemble your files.
Often fixable yourself
SSD shows up but won't open
An SSD in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
An SSD presenting as unreadable is a different situation from a hard drive doing the same thing, because there are two layers that can fail rather than one. The filesystem may be corrupt in the ordinary way, which is very recoverable. Or the drive's internal translation layer may have become inconsistent, in which case the drive still enumerates and reports a capacity but the mapping between what it presents and where the data physically sits has broken. Some drives respond to internal error thresholds by locking themselves into a read-only state, which is a deliberate protective design and, awkwardly, the best possible version of this fault because the contents are frozen exactly as they were.
No moving parts, so an SSD never clicks or grinds. What fails instead is the controller or the translation layer that maps your files onto the flash beneath them.
Corrupt filesystem metadatabetter news
The master file table or catalogue is damaged. The file content is intact and reachable; the map to it is not.
Interrupted write or unsafe removalbetter news
Power lost or the device pulled mid-write, leaving the filesystem in an inconsistent state. Usually very recoverable.
Bad sectors in the metadata region
The drive is degrading and the unreadable areas happen to be the ones holding the index. This case does have a clock on it.
Encryption without the key
BitLocker, FileVault or a NAS volume password. The data is intact but mathematically unreachable without the key or password.
What to check first on an SSD
- Check whether the drive is read-only rather than unreadable. A drive that can be read but not written is not failing at that moment, and everything on it can be copied off in the ordinary way.
- Read its SMART attributes if you can, particularly the wear and reserved-block figures, which distinguish a worn-out drive from a corrupted filesystem.
- If it is readable at all, copy the data you care about off before doing anything else, because that state is not guaranteed to survive a power cycle.
What not to do
Do not run a firmware update, a secure erase, or the manufacturer's tool to restore the drive to working order, and do not run chkdsk on it. Each of those rewrites the translation layer, and on an SSD that layer is the only thing that knows where your files physically live. Once it is rebuilt the data is not merely hidden, it is unaddressable.
Try this before you pay anyone
Genuinely recoverable at home, provided the device still presents itself
- First establish that the device is stable rather than failing: it stays connected instead of dropping out mid-copy, and it reports its correct capacity rather than a wildly wrong one. A device reporting the wrong size has a controller fault, and software cannot reach past that.
- Check whether it has gone read-only. That is a protective state rather than a failure, and it means everything on it can still be copied off in the ordinary way.
- Never scan the affected device and write the output back to it. Recover to a different disk with more free space than the data you are recovering.
- TestDisk repairs lost partition tables and is free and open source. PhotoRec, from the same project, ignores the filesystem entirely and carves files out by signature, which is the right tool when the index is gone.
- Recover, verify the files actually open, and only then consider reformatting the original.
Carved files usually come back without their original names and folder structure, because that lived in the index that failed. That is normal. Two things end this early: if the device is encrypted, no carving tool can read what it cannot decrypt; and on an SSD where the files were deleted or the volume formatted rather than merely corrupted, TRIM may already have erased the flash, in which case there is nothing left for any tool to find.
How recoverable this is
Usually good, and often very good, because the media is intact and the fault is in the description of the data rather than in the data. The main determinant is not the original fault at all. It is whether a repair tool has already been run. Cases that arrive untouched tend to go well. Cases where chkdsk has already rewritten the structures are meaningfully harder, and sometimes that is what decides the outcome.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether a repair, format or chkdsk has already been run against it
- Whether the controller is still answering, or the translation layer has collapsed under it
- Whether the volume is encrypted, and whether the key or password is available
- How much has been written to the device since the problem appeared
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
Deleted, formatted or corrupt (drive healthy)
Files deleted, a drive reformatted, a partition lost, a filesystem that won't mount. The media itself is fine; the map to the data isn't.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on an SSD
Detected but unreadable on other devices
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.