Did I have a failed SSD, or virus attack?

[ssal]

The Toshiba S855 was working fine yesterday. Battery was running low and I closed the lid, which sent it to sleep. A couple of hours later when I tried to use it, the keyboard was not responding. The mouse moved, but the click was sporadic.

Robooted it a few times, same problem. It seemed if I quickly got to the keyboard (typing the login password), the key would work for that couple of seconds, but then it froze again. In other word, it seemed to me that the start up process progressed and the machine hit something that caused the keyboard not to work.

I was able to get in with Safe Mode. But the minute I changed it back to normal boot, problem again.

Somewhere in the long night, I got alert message that my AVG and Window defender were disabled. I tried to enable them, but it would stay disabled. I clicked on the AVG launch icon. The hour glass came on about 20 seconds and then nothing happen. This is the part that lead me to think that it may be virus attack.

I swapped out the SSD and put the mirror HD on and the machine works normally. (That led me to think that there is nothing wrong with the machine).

I tried cloning the HDD to the SSD two times. First time, I got "No boot device" and it stopped. I re-cloned it again. 2nd time, I go "Missing \Windows\System32\winload.efi"

As last resort, I reinstalled window (restore to factory setting) to the SSD with the recovery disks. The machine, with the SSD was functioning normally.

Then I booted the machine with the Macrium USB and restore the SSD from an image file I created a couple weeks again. So far, it seems to be working.

I am a little dumbfound about this. Lost a lot of time, and a couple of days of emails. I really want to know what was the real culprit so that, if it happens again, I may be a bit more knowledgeable.

Please often me your opinion.

 

[johnb35]

Hard to tell now after the fact. A lot of problems with machines going into sleep mode.

 

[ssal]

Just an update. The laptop is running perfectly normal (knock on wood).

Still don't know if it was virus attack, or hardware failure.

SSD tends to be very freaky about power loss. Putting the laptop to sleep could cut off power to the drive, which causes a shut down that leads to non-recognition. When I called Crucial, they told me to change the power setting to "never shut down" the harddrive.

But virus attack still remains a big possibility because the anti-virus softwares were disabled.

The moral of the story is . . .

1. Backup your data religiously and frequently.
2. Clone or image your drive so you don't have to reinstall from scratch, which could be much more painful.