Dell mini Inspiron 910 - STEC SSD repair faulty disk

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How to revive your Dell Mini 9 failed Mini PCIe SSD disk 

On this page we are going to look at the Dell Mini 9 Inspiron 910 mini laptop / netbook and a common problem that some users have faced.

The Dell Mini 9 Inspiron that we are going to talk about here had the following specifications and were all just over twelve months old.

Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 16GB SSD , 8.9" WSVGA, Integrated Webcam

Graphics Media Accelerator950, USB 2.0 Ports: 3 , Video Out Ports: 1, OS XP Home

            

We have had several of these mini laptop / netbooks sent to us for repairs all giving symptom's of a failed disk. When switching the Dell Mini 9 on,  the screen would show errors as " Operating system not Found" and on two of these the SSD disk was being reported as 0MB within the bios.

Normally this error in most cases is the symptom's of a failing hard disk and usually requires the hard disk to be replaced.

On the Dell Mini 9 the hard disk consists of a Mini PCIe PATA SSD disk which unlike normal hard disks consist of no moving parts. The Mini PCIe PATA SSD is made of memory chips which will retain data after power loss.

The STEC Mini PCIe PATA SSD on the Dell Mini can be located on the rear of the laptop by removing the hardware compartment lid which is held by two screws.

Most people that we have come across seem to replace their SSD disks when they encounter this error as this is the advise by Dell Support to them. Further when you encounter these errors the disk becomes inaccessible for any of the usual disk utilities including Linux GPart. You will find that using the Linux Live CD for accessing the SSD for partitioning, formatting and other tests is always unsuccessful. 

We believe that occasionally some of the data on the disk becomes corrupt and the disk is also occasionally unable to re-align itself. The disk will then go into a lock and give symptons as described above. You will also find very limited information on the Internet to resolve this issue.

Our method for recovering your STEC Mini PCIe PATA SSD disk evolves running a utility within a bootable CD or USB media to re-align and updating the disk firmware. This utility was made available from STEC the SSD Disk manufacturer to whom we are very grateful to. The utility will destroy all data on the disk and when completed revive what was a dead SSD disk. You will then need to re-partition and format your SSD disk. If all goes well your final task is to re-install your OS and data to your Dell Mini 9

You Should be aware that this procedure will destroy all data on the disk. We offer no guarantee or warranty that this procedure will work for you.

To repair and revive your failed STEC Mini PCIe SSD disk this is the procedure that works for us.

You will need to download the utility firmware and prepare the bootable media on another computer or laptop. Below are the step by step instructions we use to repair our STEC Mini PCIe SSD.

1. Prepare a USB Pen Drive formatted with Fat32 and with a bootable dos system.
2. Instructions for creating a bootable usb pen drive can be found at How to make a bootable usb flash drive
3. Download the following STEC SSD 8 / 16GB util firmware to your desktop and unzip the contents with winzip.
4. Copy the unzipped "stecssdutil" utility folder to your bootable USB pen drive.
5. When the above steps are complete remove your newly created USB pen drive and now go to the Dell Mini 9.
6. Ensure that the Dell Mini 9 is plugged into the power supply. This is very important.
7. Now plug in your USB bootable pen drive with the stecssdutil folder contents.
8. Switch on your Dell Mini 9 and keep pressing 0 (Zero) on the keyboard. You should be prompted with a screen asking which device to boot from. You will need to ensure that you are booting from the USB pen drive (USB Hard Drive).
9. If the usb pen drive has successfully booted you will be navigated in to the dos environment with the screen at the command prompt C:\  .
10. Now type "CD stecssdutil" and press enter. You will now be navigated into "c:\stecssdutil" folder.
    If a message is shown that the directory cannot be found or does not exist then for those people type "cd stecss~1" and press enter. For those people you should now be navigated into "c:\"cd stecss~1".
11. Type "mcru004.exe" and press enter.
12. Now do not touch any thing or switch off. Let the utility complete. This may take some time to complete. Let the utility firmware finish or you will destroy your disk.
13. If an error is shown by the utility then the chances are that the disk is failing and should be replaced. We recommend that you carry out the procedure again to confirm that the disk is failing. If no errors are shown then go to the next step. 
14. When the utility completes you will be back at the C:\ prompt or C:\stecssdutil\ prompt .
15. You can now remove the pen drive and switch the Dell Mini 9 off.

The final steps require preparing your repaired STEC SSD drive and then re-installing your OS from your recovery CD's.

We used the Linux Live GParted CD which can be found at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php for deleting the old partition and then creating a new NTFS partition and a NTFS format to complete our procedure.

The final step will be to re-install the Dell Mini 9 OS and drivers from the Dell Recovery media that came with your Dell Mini 9.

Finally this is the very same procedure that some people are selling on ebay to revive this particular SSD disk for you. We hope that our readers will save some money and have the satisfaction on carrying out this repair themselves. Our personal opinion is that Dell Support should offer this publicly as a free of charge repair for the user's effected to carry out. They should also make more of an attempt to make this issue more known on their support site and the Internet.

We hope our readers have enjoyed our project and will come back to www.punj.co.uk for our views on more technological projects and products.

If you have enjoyed our latest tip or wish to discuss this further then please leave your comments and suggestions below.

** Update **
We will publish updated firmwares at our main site at  www.punj.co.uk 
once we are satisified that they are safe to do so.
So please keep checking our main site for further information and updates at www.punj.co.uk

Please Note:- We do not offer support for disk passwords. Please do not ask us for password support. We are sorry but we will not be able to assist.

punj