Hi! I have a framework 13 that’s been having some problems (Ubuntu 24.something, AMD Ryzen™ AI 300 Series). I opened a ticket with support and sent various photos and diagnostics at their request, but responses got slower and slower, and now it’s been a week since they last replied.
Has anyone had a similar experience? Were you able to get a reply eventually? The laptop is still under warranty, so I don’t want to mess with it too much, but it would be cool if it worked again. All advice welcome!
Do you get anything on the screen? Can you get into the BIOS?
I think support are snowed under given they’re working their way through the 13 Pro shipments. One tip we have received here is to be careful not to send extraneous messages to support on an open ticket, since it resets your “last replied” timestamp to zero, and you’re back at the end of the queue again.
Initially it wouldn’t boot, and the screen stayed black but the backlight turned on, but then it started (or I finally noticed) booting into emergency mode only. Everything works if I boot from a USB drive, which feels like a good sign. I think it’s the SSD that’s having the problems.
Oooh, I worked somewhere in the past that would close tickets automatically if there was no activity, so I have sent a few replies just to say “hi, trying to keep my ticket alive”. I will stop doing that! Thank you
Ah, perfect. Is your alternative a bootable distro like Ubuntu? That should give you enough access to the machine to do a few checks. If you like, you can open the machine and physically remove the SSD, so it does not get wiped.
My current theories are (1) data corruption - the drive is fine, but the filing system became corrupted and the OS needs a reinstall, or (2) the drive is not fine and you need a new one.
Ideally you can restore all your data from external/cloud backups, but if not, you might be able to use file recovery software to obtain files from the drive.
A good way of testing a machine is to get a copy of memtest86 and put it on a memory stick. This will immersion test your RAM. Again you can remove your SSD while you do this, as it does not need an SSD to work.
Luckily, this isn’t my primary machine, and I was able to grab the files I wanted pretty easily when it was running off the USB drive (with Ubuntu). Framework sent me a diagnostic to run that said “ Filesystem error [high confidence]” – would that be the OS reinstall case?
(It also said “Health: 292 media errors, 3796029 unexpected power-offs”, which I believe is my fault for forgetting to turn it off before going out of town for a week.) I’m not that experienced with Linux so I’m assuming I did something to cause the situation.
It’s possible it was not shut down correctly, though in my experience, modern Linux tends to be quite forgiving about such things.
If you’ve managed to grab all your files then you can breathe easy - there are three things I’d do from this point. Firstly, use your boot drive to give you a working system, leaving your SSD in situ. Then use fsck to repair the filing system. That might make it bootable on its own. fsck does have a small chance of breaking something (e.g. you mistype a command) but if you have a good backup then it’s not really a worry.
If that does not work, consider reinstalling Linux on top of the drive. That will wipe its contents, but if you’ve done a backup already, again that won’t matter.
If they all fail then boot into temporary Linux via USB and inspect the NVMe via the Disks utility. You should be able to get a SMART assessment from here.
When you say “FW13 won’t boot”. Can you give any more information?
Is anything displayed on the display when it fails to boot?
One thing that can make the laptop to not be very helpful, is something called “secure boot”. When it fails to boot, quite often it will not give any useful reason why it failed.
So, a good first thing to try is to press F2 again and again while booting to get into the BIOS.
Then switch off “secure boot”. Then try booting again. It might get further.
Oh, it starts up into the GRUB screen, and when I choose Ubuntu, it starts loading, then hits an error and kicks into emergency mode. I can’t get it to fully boot from emergency mode, but I can hit Enter and end up in a shell
Oh there was also an error it would print before going to emergency mode: ucsi_acpi USBC000:00: unknown error 256 (here is a screen photo of some journalctl output)
That is a really helpful picture.
Do you see those bright red messages at the top saying “critical medium error” ?
They mean that your nvme SSD is broken and you need a new nvme SSD.
If that is a FW provided SSD, show them that picture and ask for a replacement SSD.
Ah, okay, that’s what some light googling led me to believe, so feeling good that I had the general vibe of it. I’ve sent Support that and many additional internal and external photos, as well as some diagnostic tool output, so hopefully I’ll hear back soonish! RIP my SSD
The SSD is the bit of the computer that holds all your files. So you have likely lost all the files from the SSD. I hope you had backups of them, or copies of your valuable files, like photos, elsewhere.
Filesystem error [high confidence]” – would that be the OS reinstall case?
3796029 unexpected power-offs”, which I believe is my fault for forgetting to turn it off before going out of town for a week.) I’m not that experienced with Linux so I’m assuming I did something to cause the situation.
