Microsoft Corporation — Remote Support Caused Permanent Hardware Damage

Ryan — seconding Zoha on the backup. Image the whole drive today rather than copying individual files; if SMART is flagging imminent failure, you may not get a second chance at it. Macrium Reflect or Clonezilla to an external disk.

Beyond that, I'd gently suggest the causation argument is what's keeping this stuck, and no amount of escalation will move it while that's the case.

A partition shrink is a logical operation. It rewrites filesystem metadata and relocates data within the existing NAND — a few gigabytes of writes at most, even run repeatedly. The PC SN810 is rated for hundreds of terabytes written. There is no mechanism by which diskpart, or any partition tool, can reach the drive's wear counters, spare block pool, or internal error registers.

Error 301 is worth understanding properly, because it's the strongest evidence in the thread and it points the other way. It isn't Windows' assessment or HP's — it's HP's BIOS reading health attributes maintained by the SSD's own firmware. That's precisely why it survived your Windows reinstall: a reinstall cannot reset those counters. The persistence you're citing as proof of damage actually demonstrates the fault sits below anything Windows touched.

The boot-time disk check is the same story. Windows sets the volume dirty bit when a write fails, and a drive with uncorrectable sectors re-sets it on every boot. Nobody configured that. fsutil dirty query C: from an elevated prompt will confirm it.

If you want the escalation review Zoha suggests to actually reach a conclusion, give them the data that decides it. Install WD Dashboard, or run smartctl -a /dev/nvme0 from smartmontools, and record Percentage Used, Available Spare, Available Spare Threshold, Media and Data Integrity Errors, and Power On Hours. Those figures will show whether the drive was already degrading before 9 December 2025 — and if wear was well advanced by then, that settles it in a way nine more months of correspondence won't.

On the replacement itself: the SSD was supplied by HP in an HP laptop under HP's warranty, and that's who can actually replace it. Microsoft has no route to authorise hardware replacement by another manufacturer. Check your warranty status against the serial on HP's support site. If it's expired, a 1 TB Gen4 NVMe runs about US$70–100 and the swap on an OMEN is a fifteen-minute job with a Phillips driver — likely faster and cheaper than continuing to pursue this.

One caution: Zoha is right that Q&A moderators contact authors privately here on the platform, and that's legitimate. But this thread is public and contains three case numbers. If anyone reaches out by email, phone, or any channel outside Microsoft Q&A claiming to be Microsoft escalation, treat it as fraudulent — don't grant remote access or confirm case details.

Hi Ryan,

Given the failed SMART/DST tests and hardware error 301, I would back up your important files immediately and avoid further disk or partition operations until the SSD is replaced or evaluated.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Q&A cannot determine whether the remote session caused the hardware failure or authorize an SSD replacement. Since you already have three Microsoft support cases, I would keep the request tied to those cases and specifically ask for a support manager/escalation review of the remote-session history and diagnostic evidence.

You can also wait for a Microsoft moderator to review this post. Q&A moderators can contact question authors privately when case numbers, logs, or other sensitive details need to be exchanged.

Thank you, and feel free to respond back for more assistance.