Crucial M4 128GB SSD MTR BOOTMGR is missing
David | June 29, 2014I had the unfortunate experience of coming home to a server that would not boot. For over 2 years this SSD has been working fine. The screen simply read “MTR BOOTMGR is missing”. I spent the weekend in forums researching the problem and tried quite a few different ideas, but could not overcome the fact that the boot sector on my Crucial m4 128GB is gone. I bought the SSD back in Fed of 2010, so technically it is still within the 3 year manufacturer’s warranty. In any case, here are a few things I tried:
- The basic stuff. Swapping SATA cables. Swapping SATA ports. Removing other devices as possible sources of problems by disconnecting them. Going into BIOS setup and trying to detect the SSD. It was undetectable by the BIOS. I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults.
- I tried connecting the SSD to several different SATA to USB converters and trying to access the SSD via another machine. At one point I was able to get the other machine to see that there was a partition on the SSD, but I was not able to access it using Disk Manager in Windows 7. Disk Manager locked up during several attempts.
- I was finally able to use a trick where you leave the SSD unconnected for 30 seconds. With the computer off connect the power. Start the computer. Then connect the SATA connector. Then hit the reset button. After rebooting the BIOS was able to auto detect the SSD. However, the boot failed with the same type of error–no boot partition found.
I am looking forward to hearing what Crucial has to say about the boot record on the drive. Perhaps there is a trick I can use to get this SSD working again.
In any case, I am up and running on another SSD already. It was a long weekend of software installations and Windows updates!