Problems with boot, possibly bad SSD?

[Guest Astraeus]

Hey everyone. I have an Asus UX31E ultrabook given to me by a friend. It came with Windows 7 but he installed Mint on it. I am unsure of how this problem came about but here is the issue the best I can describe, and what I have tried.

 

On boot you get "error: failure writing to sector 0x6b8a1 to 'hd0' press any key to continue"

 

This stays on the screen for a few seconds and then a box with a padlock pops up. I enter the password and see the Linux Mint logo and the message "cryptsetup: sda5_crypt set up successfully"

 

Almost immediately it drops to BusyBox and (initramfs).

 

I first tried to repair the boot sector thinking maybe it was damaged somehow. I ran Boot-Repair from Ubuntu on a flash drive. Here is the resulting link: paste[dot]ubuntu[dot]com/7333559

 

Boot-Repair did not change anything. After messing with a bunch of boot repair stuff I decided to give up on trying to recover and to just wipe everything and start over. I have tried installing Ubuntu from the live cd. I have tried installing Windows. I have tried deleting all the partitions and formatting everything from multiple tools. I even tried DBAN wiping the drive. Everything fails and nothing is changed on boot. I've run memory tests, SSD checks, nothing seems to point to a hardware failure but I'm starting to think maybe the SSD is bad. I'm not sure if nothing is working because the drive is encrypted or because there is something physically wrong with it. Live-CDs run with no issue, but I cannot mount or view sda5, even with the correct password.

 

At this point I would just like to be able to use it. If it can be recovered, that's great, if not that's fine too.

 

Any thoughts on how to proceed?

 

If this is not the proper section for this post, please redirect me to one more appropriate.

 

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