Stepped away from my laptop and came to a "Boot device could not be found" screen. Rebooted just fine. How to troubleshoot the cause?

Framework Laptop 13
1

Hey guys,

I just encountered my first “major” issue with my laptop. I was using it all day (plugged in), stepped away to take out the garbage and came back to a BIOS error screen that said the boot device could not be found.

Rebooting went smoothly into windows, but now I’m paranoid that this is a symptom of a larger issue.

How can I troubleshoot the cause? I’m on the stable 3.07 bios using Windows 11.

2

It sounds like a comm issue with the nvme ssd or the ssd froze and the power cycle solved it.

Not sure if Windows does do a reboot on a panic by itself but I’d think that
-ssd became unreachable (for any reason)
-Windows crashed, reboot
-Boot device was not found still

I’d run some diagnostics on the nvme ssd, and as always, make sure I have a backup of all important data

3

Thanks. I ran the extended WD diagnostic utilities and that came up clean.

The last error in the Event Viewer for windows shows:
“An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR11 during a paging operation.”

I’d be surprised if it was a paging issue that caused this. That said, the system was not doing anything at the time, so it’s all a little suspect.

I’m hoping it was just a on-off, since this laptop has been very stable without any stability issues coming to mind.

4

Using SN850? If you are, you’ll need to update the SSD firmware.

Using SN770? Still, see if there’s an SSD firmware update for it.

5

Thanks. It’s the 770 and no new firmware update. Windows is fully updated too. I haven’t tried the 3.09 bios beta, and I’m waiting for that to be stable before I install it.

Not sure what else I can check.

6

@MidnightMatter
If the ssd indeed dropped out, then Windows would have no way of recording the failure event (would have no place to write it to), and I doubt that it’s able to store and later recall something like this in the EFI. (I might be wrong, but I’d be very surprised).

If so, you’ll have no trace of what happened.

If this issue reappears, I’d open the machine up, and I’d carefully unplug/re-plug the ssd 2-3 times, so the sliding electrodes scrape off any contamination that may be there. This helps a lot of times.

As I said, I advise for a reliable backup of all important information at all times

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