Cannot alter disk partitions with any tool on brand new PNY SSD

Question

I have a brand new PNY 120gb SSD with less than 2 days of runtime since I opened the box. It is running in a Dell E6520 laptop with a fresh copy of Windows 10 Professional 64 bit.

I installed this drive because the last one died abruptly. The last SSD started becoming corrupt and sluggish, then it died with a BSOD and BCD errors. After trying to diagnose it the drive stopped being recognized at all and I wrote it off as dead.

So I installed this PNY and within 2 days it is also corrupt, BSOD, and giving me BCD errors. I boot into WinRE and cannot get SFC /scannow to work. I removed the drive to try in another computer and SFC /scannow will not run on this drive. I tried starting the Windows Module Installer and TrustedInstaller services manually. That did not help.

Then I tried running chkdsk. I could not get it to run on the machine itself, but in another machine I successfully fixed 12 disk errors. I then tried the disk again in the original machine and still kept getting errors.

I removed the drive again and tried running all the usual bootrec commands. The rebuildMBR and fixBCD commands also fail.

So I tried going back to WinRE on the original machine and tried reformatting and reinstalling Windows once again. This time as a UEFI disk. To do that I run mbr2gpt on the drive and this fails as well.

So once again I remove the drive from the original machine and drop it in another machine. This time I'm going to use DiskPart to completely delete everything on this drive.

I literally JUST ran the following commands.....

LIST DISK
SELECT DISK 5
LIST PART
SELECT PARTITION 1
DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE
SELECT PARTITION 2
DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE
SELECT PARTITION 3
DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE

Diskpart returns "DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition" each time. Yet when I relist the partitions they all remain completely unchanged.

I want to blame the SSD drive itself, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the fault of the original laptop corrupting and possibly damaging the drives.

Does anyone have any suggestions that I could test?

Answer 1

How about a different tool?

Download Ubuntu's ISO file.

The ISO file you use to create a LiveUSB should be checked for download errors.

Make a LiveUSB following these instructions on a Linux PC or on a Windows PC.

Once you make a LiveUSB, boot with it. When the desktop appears, run GNOME Disks and use it to delete the unwanted partitions on the disk. It often succeeds when DISKPART fails.