I have had an interesting experience with the X-25M. I bought one as soon as they were available (around last November). I put it in my Lenovo X61s tablet and was very pleased with the performance increase. Then I got one of the new Macbook Pro’s and installed the drive in my new hotness laptop. In the process of partitioning and installing OS X I managed to screw up the drive. When I plug the drive into my Mac or my PC it now reports that it is an 8 MB flash drive, not an 80 GB SSD. I expect that somehow I managed to get the Mac DiskUtility to erase the firmware.

I have been on an interesting journey attempting to restore the drive to usefulness. Having read a number of articles (for example) that clearly show that the device has firmware and it can be written I figured my best course of action would be to find a way to write the correct firmware image to the to the drive.

So, I looked on Intel’s support site. No downloads for the X-25M. I called support on got a very friendly person who suggested several partitioning tools as options and that if these options didn’t work that I could get the drive replaced under warranty. I was surprised at the very positive experience given the strange nature of my request. I tried the options suggested (GPart, etc.), but I was unsuccessful in restoring the drive to service. I called back to arrange a warranty claim.

The second support representative I spoke with was very adversarial and told me that I should approach Apple as clearly the problem was Apple’s, not Intel’s. I pointed out the numerous articles in the press reporting the firmware upgrade. These were dismissed as not official Intel sites and therefore equivalent with sites providing information on Big Foot, Black Helicopters and the Illuminati. When I explained that the drive wouldn’t work in a PC either I was dismissed. I asked for a supervisor to call me and I believe one did but I was unable to take the call and they left no message.

So, being someone who prefers to master my technology (versus the reverse) I thought about what additional course of actions I might take. I wrote a note to the authors of the various review articles that mentioned the firmware upgrade process during the course of the review. I asked very politely if they could provide me with the firmware, or if they were uncomfortable with that just putting me in contact with someone at Intel who might acknowledge that these devices had writable firmware and might know how to get me a copy. I didn’t get any responses.

Next during one late night work session I thought I might find something in some of the P2P networks out there. Having largely ignored these services until now I was elated to find that a site that claimed to have some files relating to my search terms (Intel X-25M firmware). My elation quickly turned to dismay as I realized I had been suckered. Once you sign up and pay the site for entrance they have no recollection of any files associated with those search terms, but would I be interested in some porn?  I usually pretty savvy about these things so I found it humbling to be so desperate for firmware to feel like a country bumpkin at the ring toss booth on the midway.

I moved on to the next scheme. I decided to move the mountain to Muhammad. I went out and bought another X-25M. I reasoned that surely that drive would have a copy of the firmware and somewhere in the set of interesting free or commercial tools out there I could find something that I could coax in to extracting an image of that working drive’s firmware and then write that firmware to the old drive thus restoring it to service. So far I have had no luck with this approach. All the tools I have tried see a blank 80 GB drive.

So dear readers, if you have any suggestions on returning my drive to service I would love to hear from you.