Samsung Magician messed up my SSD
Posted: Thu May 16, 2013 12:03 pm
I have a Windows 8 system with a 512-GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drive. I installed the Samsung Magician utility (version 4.0), and tried using it to change the amount of over provisioning. It didn't end well.
Initially, I used the Windows Disk Management applet to shrink my 477-GB C: volume by about 1/3 (157 GB, and I know that's a lot), and then create a new volume, formatting it with NTFS but without assigning a drive letter. This left the new volume on the SSD drive as "unallocated space", and apparently the SSD drive would have automatically used it as over provisioning space.
I should have stopped there, but at the time I didn't realize that the "unallocated space" partition I created would automatically be used for over provisioning.
So, back in Samsung Magician, somehow simply using only the "Clear OP" and "Set OP" buttons screwed up my drive. Now, I have no more "unallocated space" showing in Disk Management. I just have the 350-MB recovery partition (which was there originally), and the C: volume, which appears in Disk Management as being 477 GB, as it was to begin with. The problem is that Explorer says there is only something like 320 GB TOTAL space on the drive.
It's as if when I hit "Clear OP" in the Samsung Magician utility, it deleted the 157-GB volume I had created, but that 157 GB of space was not reallocated to the C: volume.
I was going to try shrinking and then expanding the C: volume to hopefully fix this issue, but the Disk Management applet will no longer allow me to shrink the volume. When I try, it begins by showing an absurd amount of space available for shrinking (something like ~68 GB), and if I try to proceed, it stops with the oh-so-helpful "The parameter is incorrect" error.
I've run "chkdsk /f" on C: but it did absolutely nothing.
Is there something I can do (or should try) in BootIt BM--or any other utility that doesn't suck--to correct this issue?
Initially, I used the Windows Disk Management applet to shrink my 477-GB C: volume by about 1/3 (157 GB, and I know that's a lot), and then create a new volume, formatting it with NTFS but without assigning a drive letter. This left the new volume on the SSD drive as "unallocated space", and apparently the SSD drive would have automatically used it as over provisioning space.
I should have stopped there, but at the time I didn't realize that the "unallocated space" partition I created would automatically be used for over provisioning.
So, back in Samsung Magician, somehow simply using only the "Clear OP" and "Set OP" buttons screwed up my drive. Now, I have no more "unallocated space" showing in Disk Management. I just have the 350-MB recovery partition (which was there originally), and the C: volume, which appears in Disk Management as being 477 GB, as it was to begin with. The problem is that Explorer says there is only something like 320 GB TOTAL space on the drive.
It's as if when I hit "Clear OP" in the Samsung Magician utility, it deleted the 157-GB volume I had created, but that 157 GB of space was not reallocated to the C: volume.
I was going to try shrinking and then expanding the C: volume to hopefully fix this issue, but the Disk Management applet will no longer allow me to shrink the volume. When I try, it begins by showing an absurd amount of space available for shrinking (something like ~68 GB), and if I try to proceed, it stops with the oh-so-helpful "The parameter is incorrect" error.
I've run "chkdsk /f" on C: but it did absolutely nothing.
Is there something I can do (or should try) in BootIt BM--or any other utility that doesn't suck--to correct this issue?