This is my first message on this forum. I have been searching for similar issues but haven’t found any.
I was working on Excel and Firefox as usual when my Windows suddenly blue-screened (I am not using crowdstrike !). Upon reboot, my FW 13 don’t se any bootable device, and Windows is nowhere to be found but the SSD can be seen in the BIOS.
I attempted to repair windows using a Windows install USB stick, but it does not detect any Windows installation on the SSD, leaving nothing to repair. When I attempt to install Windows, it recognizes the SSD as completely blank with no partitions.
I tried a normal windows USB to use the recovery tool, and a live Windows USB, but the partitions on the SSD don’t show up. I tried a live USB repair tool called Lazesoft, I can see the partitions, but unfortunately, no tools are able to restore, or access them.
System details:
FW 13
AMD Ryzen 7 7840U
WD Black 850x
Crucial 2x16gb 5600
Windows 11
Everything is three months old.
It sounds like something has had a bad a bad accident. It could be a bad SSD, but this is unlikely; I’m only saying it because these things tend to fail early or late
Does your recovery tool list any information about the partition structure, such as the detected filesystems ? Feel free to post phone camera pictures of what you see.
But it might be quickest to just reinstall Windows and restore your home directory backups.
Welcome to the forum! Similar to what @tom_chiverton said, something wiped out what used to be called your boot sector or master table that identifies what partitions are where, sizes, etc.
It is very strange that a Blue Screen caused this though it could have if it just happened to be writing to that specific area at the time of blue screen and suddenly got interrupted and left corrupted block(s).
At best, you could try a recovery tool to recover your files but given the nature of it loosing its table of information; the best course is to format the drive and start clean again.
This is not unique to your Framework machine. It could have happened to any computer if just the right sequence of events took place. Unfortunately, if the primary and backup “boot sectors” (this is what they were called before UEFI and GPT for storage drives) are lost; there is little that can be done other than some restoration tools that literally scan each sector of a drive and put together what it sees as files.
When you do install Windows again on your drive. I would download the Western Digital SSD software and run the most comprehensive test of the SSD drive to see if this is indicative of a future failure of the SSD. SMART systems are intended to catch some things to predict failure before it occurs; however it does not test for every known failure point in an SSD.
If the drive test comes back and reports additional errors; then the SSD’s days are numbered and it will fail again. It is just a matter of when. Hopefully you had a recent backup of your important files in the cloud or somewhere else. It is a pain to reinstall Windows; though, that is the best course of action. Even if you could boot the drive again; I would not trust its full integrity on something like this that happens.
Let us know what you find out. Sorry for your trouble. Lastly, this is not necessarily something Framework support could help with recovering as it is a software issue. Likely their suggestion would be to format the drive and reinstall WIndows from the beginning.
My most important files are backed up to the cloud, so no worries about that. I still had a few things lying around and not synchronized, but nothing too bad.
So, a quick update before the big wipe. I managed to recover partitions using Testdisk, and when booting from the SSD, it now boots into Windows recovery tools, the same ones present on the USB Windows installation, but they still doesn’t work. On the live Windows, I can now access some data on the storage partitions, but the main Windows partition is too corrupted and won’t open with Windows Explorer. Even though some recovery software were able to read directories on C:/, I couldn’t recover any data from it.
Thank you for your assistance and advice. I will definitely test the SSD as soon as possible.
For a Blue screen fault causing that much corrupted data, I would assume the SSD is faulty in some way, and would probably replace it with a new one.
The old SSD might still be under warranty.
An alternative view: storage system failure was the cause; BSOD and data corruption were the consequences.
While most operating systems are running, it’s possible to alter / corrupt parts of the storage system metadata with negligible impact on the OS because in-memory copies of that metadata are used. In the instance we’re discussing in this thread, the ultimately fatal damage might have been occurring for some time before the BSOD drew it to @Rem_i’s attention.
It will be prudent (but maybe not practical) to thoroughly exercise–ideally with trustworthy diagnostic tools–the MoBo and NVMe combination before returning it to service.
I had nothing specific in mind. There are a lot of Windows users who contribute to this forum; many with component-level (and lower) knowledge. If you can afford to hold off on action until a few of them have chimed in, you might receive some useful recommendations.
The point I was really trying to convey was that there is probably a fault in your hardware. Until you have unequivocally determined that your hardware is operating to specification, you should increase whatever precautions you take to avoid data loss.
