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I am using an ASUS H110-E/M.2 motherboard on my desktop with an ADATA SX6000 120GB M.2 drive installed as a system disk, with a 1TB Hard Drive as a storage disk. The system has worked fine for several months, but recently I installed an optical drive and moved my machine between apartments, and now I am having difficulty booting into Windows. It started after the move, and I reset the BIOS settings to default whiched fixed the issue. The next day it booted into the BIOS again, and resetting the BIOS settings didn't work, so I reseated the drive and that fixed the issue. The day after that (today), I tried both of those things but I still can't get it to boot.

A couple of things: When the drive is working correctly it is displayed as "ADATA XPG 6000.." with the capacity in parentheses in the BIOS, but now when I boot it generically says: "REALTEK RTS5761 NVMe Drive" with no information on capacity. The drive is also not reporting anything via SMART. I tried booting from a Windows USB drive and reinstalling Windows, but the drive showed up as 251MB, so I booted into the command prompt and ran diskpart which showed the same thing. Since I don't have any important information on the disk, I tried cleaning with diskpart but that also didn't fix anything. A couple other things I have tried are updating the BIOS and changing the CSM/M.2 configuration in the BIOS which doesn't do anything except make the drive not be recognized at all.

Any ideas on what I could do to fix the problem? What else can I try before I RMA the drive? Could it be an issue with the M.2 slot on the motherboard?

Edited by happygeek because: moved
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Short diagnosis and next steps (expanded from ): the BIOS string "REALTEK RTS5761" is the controller talking, not the NAND chips, so the controller can still enumerate even when the flash arrays or firmware metadata are gone. That would explain seeing a tiny (~250MB) device instead of the real capacity. That symptom is commonly reported when the controller/firmware fails and only a small internal region is visible. (cdrinfo.com)

Practical checks before an RMA: try the drive in a different PC (or an M.2->PCIe adapter / NVMe USB enclosure) to rule out your motherboard slot. Boot a Linux live USB and collect the controller + health info with NVMe tools and smartmontools so you have logs to give ADATA if you RMA. Example commands to run (install nvme-cli and smartmontools first):

sudo nvme list
sudo nvme id-ctrl /dev/nvme0
sudo nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0
sudo smartctl -a -d nvme /dev/nvme0n1

If you use a USB enclosure that hides the NVMe bridge, smartctl may need a device-type argument (for Realtek bridges use -d sntrealtek). Collect any error-log entries and the nvme smart-log output. (nvmexpress.org)

If the drive still reports the tiny size or the logs show media errors / read-only or "available spare" warnings, that is strong evidence of hardware/firmware failure and RMA is appropriate — you already opened a sensible channel with ADATA. ADATA documents warranty/RMA procedures; include your collected nvme/smart logs with the ticket to speed handling. Also retain photos of the module and the M.2 slot if you suspect physical damage.

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Member Avatar for Raymond_12

Can someone move this to Hardware and Software?

Member Avatar for JamesCherrill

I had the same symptoms with an SSD that died. It seems the 250Meg was the buffer size in the drive controller and when the drive itself fails all the sytem can see is the buffer. RMA time IMHO.

Member Avatar for Raymond_12

Thanks, I started an RMA with ADATA. Hopefully the replacement drive is better, because someone told me the XPG SX6000 has longevity issues.

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