A few years back, I made the unfortunate discovery that, at least the M500 and M550 sata SSDs from Crucial, contain a "feature" that seems to permanently lock them into a read-only state if the disk ever detects an anomaly with the power delivery, including insufficient amperage (which was the issue in my case with the M550 specifically; the M500 is likely no salvageable due to actual electrical over-current damage during an earlier event).

At the time I wasn't really using Linux full-time like I am now, but I did notice that Linux was able to mount the disks as read-only and generally browse the contents without issue (I say "generally" because the seemingly-damaged M500 can be flaky and go offline when trying to read certain data on the disk).

I did humor myself and try a secure erase of the M550 since that's the disk that didn't seem to incur any damage, but the disk was still locked to read-only even after the secure erase.

A year or so ago I even tried contacting Crucial themselves but they basically told me that the read-only firmware lock is not something that can be unlocked by the end-user.

For context, a big reason why I think my M550 specifically is salvagable is because I also have some older M4 SSDs that lack this read-only firmware lock protection "feature" whereby the disk will instead tend to turn into a "temporary brick" when met with anomalous power delivery that can be salvaged by simply leaving the SSD disconnected for an hour, plugging in only power for an hour, unplugging it and then connecting it to power and sata and it'll be "magically" revived (assuming it simply suffered under-currant like my M550 and not over-currant like my M500).


So yeah, like I say in the title, this is a bit of a long shot, but it'd be nice if I could at the very least revive my 512GB M550 in some way rather than just let it turn into ewaste simply due to a locked-down firmware.

What is in the system log? Linux puts drives RO when it detects an I/O error. Also, there are settings on the drive that can be undone with hdparm. Look through the man page https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm

By the way, one thing I remember doing a while ago is that I humored myself with trying was to downgrade the M550's firmware and then subsequently re-upgrade the I think it let me do it successfully but it made no difference to my issue.


I have no idea! I don't even know what log file I should be looking at and/or where it's located. I mean, my choice of distro is the "baby's first" distro of Linux Mint, so a Linux guru I am not!

Because the M550 was secure-erased, it doesn't have any partition table so I can't mount it at all even in read-only.

It may be worth noting that Gparted just constantly throws up an input/output error regarding the M550, implying to me that the read-only lock is something a bit lower-level than hdparm (but, again, I'm by far not a Linux guru so I really haven't any idea).

Log files of various types will be in the /var/log directory. Look at the most recent syslog and dmesg logs.

Alright, here they are; I uploaded them to 0x0.st since I know that's the preferred location to upload logs for the mpv devs so I figured it'd be a known quality, though it does strip out file names...

• dmesg: http://0x0.st/HKea.txt

• syslog: http://0x0.st/HKeM.txt

Note that the M550 was listed as sdb in gnome-disk-utility.

While much of the logs are greek to me, I can at least see a slew of what may be relevant errors on both sdb and "ata4" in syslog, so I'm guessing that they refer to the same disk? (or, rather, sdb refers to the actual physical disk while ata4 refers to the port on the motherboard that the disk is plugged into)


For reference, all I did was boot the Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon live ISO, open gnome-disk-utility and look a the disk (specifically how I cannot interact with it at all in gnome-disk-utility), then open gparted, click "ignore" a bunch regarding the input/output error(s) it detected, select the M550 SSD, tell it to create a new msdos partition table, click "ignore" a bunch again regarding the input/output error(s), and that's it (note that gparted did not actually do anything and no partition table was created).

Learn to read this "greek".

Your syslog gives the answer:
ata4.00 errors indicate a dying or dead component (SATA controller, cable, drive). Such a component can disturb the entire computer. Therefore do following:

1. Create an USB stick with a live Linux e.g. Knoppix or GRML.
2. Open computer case and unplug all drives.
3. Connect Crucial CT120M500SSD1 with first SATA port.
4. Boot live Linux into console, no X & WM!
5. smartctl -s on /dev/sda
6. smartctl -a /dev/sda > file-smart.txt
7. dmesg > file-dmesg.txt
8. Save both files to an USB stick.
9. Post contents of both files.
10. Repeat procedure described above with Crucial CT512M550SSD1.

Procedure described above preserves your data on SAMSUNG SSD PM810 2.5" 7mm 256GB and gives results for each single drive without any influences of the other drives.

Oh, oops, I only just realized right now from your code block that the primary 120GB SSD in the PC is also an M500 model SSD (I thought it was something like an MX100 or MX200; it came from a friend with a laptop just around 9 months ago and lived in the laptop for 4 months and in that desktop for 5, so it never lived outside of a PC long enough for me to keep track of its exact model). The M500 I was previously talking about that is seemingly-damaged was a 480GB M500.

Therefore it's important we don't confuse the primary 120GB M500 with a different disk, whether with my 512GB M550 that I'm trying to "revive" (the one that has been secure erased) with with the aforementioned seemingly-damaged 480GB M500 (which was not connected to the PC at all).

So yeah, there's no data to preserve on the 512GB M550 because, as stated, it's been secure-erased.

And remember, I was already in a live ISO when I recorded those logs. In fact, I even made sure to not boot into the installed OS while the 512GB M550 was connected - I only tried working with it from a live ISO on that PC.


So in summary...

• Primary disk: 120GB Crucial M500
• Secondary disk: 256GB Samsung 810
• secure-erased & read-only locked disk I'm trying to "revive": 512GB Crucial M550
• troublesome seemingly-damaged disk I'm not concerned about: 480GB Crucial M500

And I do realize M500 and M550 look very similar in text, so I've double-checked to make sure that I've not made any typos in this post (no guarantees about previous posts in this thread).

If Crucial or their agents are nearby, it might be worth doing it their way. "Can not be unlocked by the end user" implies it can be unlocked. I bought or got under warranty a pcb for a Seagate HD back in the day by such a phone call. I put it on, and the thing came up. It's one option.

The M550 is an SSD from like 2015, and had a 3-year warranty, so...

Also you can't do a PCB swap on an SSD in the same way you can on a mechanical hard drive because the SSD itself is the PCB, so swapping the PCB is the same as just swapping a different SSD into the casing.

I wasn't under warranty either. But it could simply be turning it on with a jumper connected.They'll have some trick so they can do it, but you can't. Hence the phone cass suggestion.