Today, my laptop froze. I forced shutdown and rebooted. This brought me to GRUB boot menu (unusual). I chose Ubuntu, then was confronted with this error:
I tried the various other booting options available without success.
I then made a bootable linux USB and tried to boot from it, to try to recover my disk, but was not able to boot from it. The laptop did not seem to recognise it. (I confirmed the USB was fine by booting on another machine.)
I then tried to specifically boot from it using the F2 boot menu. However, it seemed as if I wasn’t able to activate this menu while the USB stick was in. (I could get to when the USB was not in.)
I then took out the USB, restarted, and got to the F12 advanced BIOS options and disabled Quick Boot and Quiet Boot, thinking that would give me more information and more time to activate F2 boot menu potentially.
Now, when I turn on the machine, it runs the system memory test, which gets to 100%, then nothing happens. I cannot get past this.
Now I cannot seem to activate either F2 boot menu or F12 BIOS options (it goes straight to the tests). With the USB in, the situation is the same.
Therefore I appear to be stuck, without access to menus or ability to boot from USB.
System details:
11th Gen Intel i7
BIOS build date: 10/27/2022
Have been running Ubuntu 20 (single boot) happily for 2 years.
Any insights or suggestions as to what I can try next would be greatly appreciated!
I opened up the laptop and removed the SSD. Restarted, then could get to boot and BIOS menus again. Re-enabled Quick Boot and Quiet Boot. Can also boot to the Linux USB.
I have now put the SSD back in, but it doesn’t seem to be recognised. It doesn’t show the GRUB boot menu that I had before - it acts the same as when I removed it. Furthermore, when I booted to live Linux USB, the SSD didn’t show up in the visible disks (though my 250GB expansion card did). Perhaps I haven’t put it back in right, but that seems unlikely (checked it twice, and framework seemed to have made it hard to go wrong here).
How can I get towards figuring out what’s wrong here and (wishfully) recovering some function and/or data?
My guess is the BIOS is not happy trying to read faulty SSDs. I guess the only option is to put the ssd in an external usb enclosure and plug it in after having already booted into the os.
That being said, I think your SSD is probably unreadable now.
Not being able to read sector 0 is not a good sign.
How likely this to be a hardware issue, and how would I tell? Could it be that after getting a USB enclosure, and reformatting the disk, that it is then ready to use again as a primary internal SSD?
Nicholas, I understand this might be painful to accept but from what you’ve described I wouldn’t trust that SSD again; it’s toast.
There’s a thread about a particular model of WD SSD that had some copies just carc it for no apparent reason. The FW crew were tracking occurrences in this thread: [TRACKING] WD_BLACK SN850 sudden death.
If yours is the same model and you purchased it from FW, add a response to the above thread and contact support with a link to your response.
