Question Computer suddenly stopped booting to my NVMe drive.

[D_Schultz]

I know there are threads on here about issues booting to NVMe drives, but all solutions I have tried have not worked. I will try to explain everything that happened.

I built my computer about a year and a half ago. It has worked perfectly with no issues until today... below are the components of my build...

AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
64GB DDR4 3600 MHz Ram
MSI Nvidia 3080ti
Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
Samsung 980 pro 2TB NVMe drive

Today, I decided to try playing some games from Steam that I have not played in a long time. I hadn't even logged in to Steam in a long time. When I logged in, there were 4 programs that needed updating(3 games and one program for my daughters full body tracking for VR). The updates would not complete, they just kept cycling. Eventually I had to uninstall all 4 programs and reinstall them. After they installed, they all gave a green "play" button which means they must have installed successfully.

Minutes after completing these installs, My screen when black and I got the "No bootable device found, reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." I could not get past that message. At this time, I could still see the NVMe drive in the BiOS under the boot menu. This is the only drive I have in this computer.

One of the solutions I found online that supposedly could help this issue was to go to the Exit tab in the BiOS and choose "Load Optimized Defaults." After Making that selection and rebooting, now the NVMe does not show up at all under the boot menu. I tried booting to a USB with Windows 11 on it, but when I progress through the install for Windows and get to the section to select the drive/partition to install on, I get an error that Windows can not install on that drive.

In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.

I have checked the CSM setting and it is disabled. I do not know where to go from here. The only settings I ever changed after building my computer was the RAM frequency. By default it was 2666 MHz, and I changed it to 3600 MHz to match the RAM speed I installed. After having these issues, I did update the BiOS. The version I had was from 2022. I downloaded the latest BiOS for my motherboard from the Asus site and updated it successfully, but issue persists.

I did literally just now notice while I am typing this that at the top of the Asus BiOS screen, it says "UEFI BiOS Utility - Advanced Mode." I am not sure if the UEFI part of that may be of any importance or not. I don't know a whole lot about this stuff and what to do in BiOS without bricking everything. Any help anyone could give me would be great. I really don't want to have to buy a new drive and replace it. Thank you so much for any help any of you could give me!!

Edit: I forgot to mention, I did remove the CMOS battery and restart. But still the same result.

Edit : I will try to post a couple pictures here of what I am seeing in the BIOS. I hope I do this right and these links work. In the first picture showing the boot menu, the "Boot option priorities" and the "Boot Override" options are greyed out and I can not do anything with them even though it is hard to tell that in the pictures. Prior to clicking "Load Optimized Defaults" in the Exit tab, my NVMe drive used to show under "Boot Option Priorities" on this page.
This is my Boot Menu

This next picture is under the Advanced tab where my drive is still showing.
This is the Advanced tab

 

[hedwar2011]

UEFI BIOS Utility is just the name of your BIOS itself. Advanced Mode may simply be a more-configurable mode of such.

1) Have you tried powering off, reseating the drive, and booting again? If not, try that.
2) Have you tried fully resetting the BIOS?
3) Have you tried pulling the CMOS battery to reset the configuration?

 

[D_Schultz]

UEFI BIOS Utility is just the name of your BIOS itself. Advanced Mode may simply be a more-configurable mode of such.

1) Have you tried powering off, reseating the drive, and booting again? If not, try that.
2) Have you tried fully resetting the BIOS?
3) Have you tried pulling the CMOS battery to reset the configuration?

Sorry, I forgot to mention in my original post, I did remove the CMOS battery and reboot, but still the same.

I have not tried resetting the BIOS, I thought removing the battery would accomplish the same thing, if I am wrong, please let me know. If resetting the BIOS settings is different, then I can't say for sure that I know how to do that.

I also have not tried reseating the drive. I thought about that, but there is that screw that holds the drive in place, so I didn't think it would have moved, but I will certainly try it and see what happens

 

[mdd1963]

If the drive at least shows, it does not hurt to ask if you have any sort of recent backup image from Acronis, Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, etc.? (Certainly, restoring an image is fairly easy, *if* the drive in question has not failed...; there was a large rash of 980 firmware issues about a year or so ago, but, presumably you would have seen signs of decreasing drive health in Samsung Magician, and, a notice of a firmware update being available quite a few months back....)

Do you actually need anything important recovered from this drive? (the answer to that question greatly influences any suggested courses of possible action from that point...; don't want to recommend reinitializing/quick reformatting within disk mngmt unless we know you don't care about what's on the drive, or, what WAS on the drive prior to the glitch or failure...

 

[D_Schultz]

If the drive at least shows, it does not hurt to ask if you have any sort of recent backup image from Acronis, Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, etc.? (Certainly, restoring an image is fairly easy, *if* the drive in question has not failed...; there was a large rash of 980 firmware issues about a year or so ago, but, presumably you would have seen signs of decreasing drive health in Samsung Magician, and, a notice of a firmware update being available quite a few months back....)

Do you actually need anything important recovered from this drive? (the answer to that question greatly influences any suggested courses of possible action from that point...; don't want to recommend reinitializing/quick reformatting within disk mngmt unless we know you don't care about what's on the drive, or, what WAS on the drive prior to the glitch or failure...

So when I try booting from a USB that I have Windows 11 on, if I choose the option to revert back to a restore point, I have a point from 12/15/23. When I chose to try that, I got an error it was unable to use that restore point.

I do not really have anything of importance on the drive that I would be worried about losing. I was more than willing to do a complete reinstall of Windows, but it just keeps giving me an error that it was unable to install windows on my drive.

 

[D_Schultz]

I know there are threads on here about issues booting to NVMe drives, but all solutions I have tried have not worked. I will try to explain everything that happened.

I built my computer about a year and a half ago. It has worked perfectly with no issues until today... below are the components of my build...

AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
64GB DDR4 3600 MHz Ram
MSI Nvidia 3080ti
Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
Samsung 980 pro 2TB NVMe drive

Today, I decided to try playing some games from Steam that I have not played in a long time. I hadn't even logged in to Steam in a long time. When I logged in, there were 4 programs that needed updating(3 games and one program for my daughters full body tracking for VR). The updates would not complete, they just kept cycling. Eventually I had to uninstall all 4 programs and reinstall them. After they installed, they all gave a green "play" button which means they must have installed successfully.

Minutes after completing these installs, My screen when black and I got the "No bootable device found, reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." I could not get past that message. At this time, I could still see the NVMe drive in the BiOS under the boot menu. This is the only drive I have in this computer.

One of the solutions I found online that supposedly could help this issue was to go to the Exit tab in the BiOS and choose "Load Optimized Defaults." After Making that selection and rebooting, now the NVMe does not show up at all under the boot menu. I tried booting to a USB with Windows 11 on it, but when I progress through the install for Windows and get to the section to select the drive/partition to install on, I get an error that Windows can not install on that drive.

In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.

I have checked the CSM setting and it is disabled. I do not know where to go from here. The only settings I ever changed after building my computer was the RAM frequency. By default it was 2666 MHz, and I changed it to 3600 MHz to match the RAM speed I installed. After having these issues, I did update the BiOS. The version I had was from 2022. I downloaded the latest BiOS for my motherboard from the Asus site and updated it successfully, but issue persists.

I did literally just now notice while I am typing this that at the top of the Asus BiOS screen, it says "UEFI BiOS Utility - Advanced Mode." I am not sure if the UEFI part of that may be of any importance or not. I don't know a whole lot about this stuff and what to do in BiOS without bricking everything. Any help anyone could give me would be great. I really don't want to have to buy a new drive and replace it. Thank you so much for any help any of you could give me!!

Edit: I forgot to mention, I did remove the CMOS battery and restart. But still the same result.

I just tried an earlier suggestion of reseating the drive. I pulled it out cleaned it, put it back in. Same result. It is not available under the boot tab in BIOS, but it does show under the advanced tab as I stated in my original post. Everything is greyed out except the option to test the drive. If I choose to test the drive it locks up and no longer responds, I then have to power it off and restart it to get back in to BIOS.

I just don't know what changes would have been made by clicking the "Load Optimized Defaults" option that made me lose the drive as a boot option.

 

[Deleted member 2962262]

'In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.' It's possible the drive is starting to fail.

If you create a bootable linux USB and boot into that you should be able to run some disk test utilities from there to gauge the health of the drive.

 

[D_Schultz]

'In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.' It's possible the drive is starting to fail.

If you create a bootable linux USB and boot into that you should be able to run some disk test utilities from there to gauge the health of the drive.

I will look into doing this. I have never used Linux before, so I will need to look up how to do that and what utilities to use, but I will give it a try. Thank you.

 

[mdd1963]

I just tried an earlier suggestion of reseating the drive. I pulled it out cleaned it, put it back in. Same result. It is not available under the boot tab in BIOS, but it does show under the advanced tab as I stated in my original post. Everything is greyed out except the option to test the drive. If I choose to test the drive it locks up and no longer responds, I then have to power it off and restart it to get back in to BIOS.

I just don't know what changes would have been made by clicking the "Load Optimized Defaults" option that made me lose the drive as a boot option.

If willing to reinstall, within installation options, it might still show the old partitions there, which would need to be deleted one at a time at the 'choose drive' portion of the installation menus, via the red X option listed below..

Hoping after it all shows 'unallocated space', you'll be good to go for reinstall....

 

[mdd1963]

You'd be hoping that Linux can repair the NTFS partition...

You might be able to repair the first boot partition from within cmd line of Win10/11 install USB , jumping to whichever directory/drive is the original C drive. Research 'repairing MBR from recovery partition in cmd line,....; certainly can't hurt to try. I'd expect MS's efforts to repair/replace the MBR from the backup to be perhaps more successful than a Linux attempt to simply repair it, but, that is admittedly only a 'guess'.

If unsuccessful, you can eventually revert to the suggestion of simply deleting the partitions where they are shown in the installation menu, effectively blanking the drive to simple 'unallocated space'..

Good luck

 

[D_Schultz]

'In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.' It's possible the drive is starting to fail.

If you create a bootable linux USB and boot into that you should be able to run some disk test utilities from there to gauge the health of the drive.

So I just tried this. I created a USB with Ubuntu on it. I was able to see the drive. When I checked it, there were a few partitions. The first small partition of about 105MB showed it was damaged. All other partitions that allowed me to check the file systems showed they were intact.

For the partition that showed damage, I selected to repair it. It said the repair was successful. I rechecked the file system and it showed intact instead of damaged. When I rebooted the computer though I still got the same results as before, nothing changed. I went back in to Ubuntu, checked the partition and it once again said damaged.

I will try to post a link to a couple pictures. I apologize, I am not real good with this stuff and was not sure how to get a screenshot, so I took the picture with my phone and loaded it to imgur. I hope the links work.

This image is the partition that showed damaged

This image shows the message I got about the partition being damaged

In the first image, you can see the large partition in the middle. If I Mount that partition, I am able to access it and see all the files and programs I have on it that I could see prior to all this happening.

 

[mdd1963]

You might be able to find WIndows cmd line options to restore main Master Boot Record from backup/recovery partition. (Google will have examples, I'm sure, and this might be more effective than Ubuntu's attempts to simply 'repair it', as who knows if it is trying to restore a copy from backup, or simply write over original with what it thinks is best, but, I'd suspect Windows can likely repair Windows boot partition more effectively than Linux...)

(This would be jumping to cmd line/terminal from within a WIn10/11 installation USB flash drive, selecting repair, then command line, and steering/changing directory to however the C: drive shows up within the installer USB's cmd line, which if memory serves will not be the C-Drive if I recall correctly, but hav some oddball labeling, but you should recognize it by name and size in GB/1000's of MB, etc...)

 

[D_Schultz]

You'd be hoping that Linux can repair the NTFS partition...

You might be able to repair the first boot partition from within cmd line of Win10/11 install USB , jumping to whichever directory/drive is the original C drive. Research 'repairing MBR from recovery partition in cmd line,....; certainly can't hurt to try. I'd expect MS's efforts to repair/replace the MBR from the backup to be perhaps more successful than a Linux attempt to simply repair it, but, that is admittedly only a 'guess'.

If unsuccessful, you can eventually revert to the suggestion of simply deleting the partitions where they are shown in the installation menu, effectively blanking the drive to simple 'unallocated space'..

Good luck

Thanks for the advice. Everything else failed to resolve the issue so I went ahead and tried to delete the partitions and start fresh. Unfortunately that wouldn't work either. There are a few partitions showing, 3 are 100MB each, one is 16MB, and the last is 1862GB. None of the smaller ones will allow me to delete them. I was able to delete the big partition, but windows gave an error that it could not install. I tried clicking new to creat a new partition, and that also threw an error. Not sure what else there is to try. It is sounding like I may need to just replace the drive.

 

[mdd1963]

Can you jump to cmd line from 'repair installation' from the installer, run diskpart, then list disk, then select disk x (where x is whichever 2 TB drive you are dealing with, likely disk 0 or 1, then, 'clean'...

After several seconds, then 'list disk' again, and it should then show all space available, none used.....

(i you tinkered with any Linux earlier, sometimes removing those partitions can be 'stubborn' within normal disk mngmt or even Windows installer menu.)

Good luck

 

[D_Schultz]

Can you jump to cmd line from 'repair installation' from the installer, run diskpart, then list disk, then select disk x (where x is whichever 2 TB drive you are dealing with, likely disk 0 or 1, then, 'clean'...

After several seconds, then 'list disk' again, and it should then show all space available, none used.....

(i you tinkered with any Linux earlier, sometimes removing those partitions can be 'stubborn' within normal disk mngmt or even Windows installer menu.)

Good luck

I went to cmd and ran diskpart, then list disk. Two showed, 0 and 1. 0 was 1863 GB with 1862 free. I selected drive 0, ran 'clean' and it said it was successful. Ran 'list disk' again and it showed 1863 GB with 1863 free.

I then went back through to attempt to install windows. Again, got to the point where is shows 4 different partitions, just like before. I still got an error trying to install windows. It says it cannot install on that partition. I am unable to delete any partitions except the main big partition which showed 1863 GB. I deleted it again, but still got an error that windows could not be installed.

 

[D_Schultz]

I know there are threads on here about issues booting to NVMe drives, but all solutions I have tried have not worked. I will try to explain everything that happened.

I built my computer about a year and a half ago. It has worked perfectly with no issues until today... below are the components of my build...

AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
64GB DDR4 3600 MHz Ram
MSI Nvidia 3080ti
Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
Samsung 980 pro 2TB NVMe drive

Today, I decided to try playing some games from Steam that I have not played in a long time. I hadn't even logged in to Steam in a long time. When I logged in, there were 4 programs that needed updating(3 games and one program for my daughters full body tracking for VR). The updates would not complete, they just kept cycling. Eventually I had to uninstall all 4 programs and reinstall them. After they installed, they all gave a green "play" button which means they must have installed successfully.

Minutes after completing these installs, My screen when black and I got the "No bootable device found, reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." I could not get past that message. At this time, I could still see the NVMe drive in the BiOS under the boot menu. This is the only drive I have in this computer.

One of the solutions I found online that supposedly could help this issue was to go to the Exit tab in the BiOS and choose "Load Optimized Defaults." After Making that selection and rebooting, now the NVMe does not show up at all under the boot menu. I tried booting to a USB with Windows 11 on it, but when I progress through the install for Windows and get to the section to select the drive/partition to install on, I get an error that Windows can not install on that drive.

In the BiOS, if I go to Advanced>NVMe configuration, I do still see my NVMe drive showing there, but it is no longer showing as a boot option.

I have checked the CSM setting and it is disabled. I do not know where to go from here. The only settings I ever changed after building my computer was the RAM frequency. By default it was 2666 MHz, and I changed it to 3600 MHz to match the RAM speed I installed. After having these issues, I did update the BiOS. The version I had was from 2022. I downloaded the latest BiOS for my motherboard from the Asus site and updated it successfully, but issue persists.

I did literally just now notice while I am typing this that at the top of the Asus BiOS screen, it says "UEFI BiOS Utility - Advanced Mode." I am not sure if the UEFI part of that may be of any importance or not. I don't know a whole lot about this stuff and what to do in BiOS without bricking everything. Any help anyone could give me would be great. I really don't want to have to buy a new drive and replace it. Thank you so much for any help any of you could give me!!

Edit: I forgot to mention, I did remove the CMOS battery and restart. But still the same result.

Edit : I will try to post a couple pictures here of what I am seeing in the BIOS. I hope I do this right and these links work. In the first picture showing the boot menu, the "Boot option priorities" and the "Boot Override" options are greyed out and I can not do anything with them even though it is hard to tell that in the pictures. Prior to clicking "Load Optimized Defaults" in the Exit tab, my NVMe drive used to show under "Boot Option Priorities" on this page.
This is my Boot Menu

This next picture is under the Advanced tab where my drive is still showing.
This is the Advanced tab

I really appreciate everyone's help and suggestions. Unfortunately nothing has worked to resolve my issue and I am to the point where I am just going to admit defeat. I will just replace the drive and start fresh with a new one. Again, thanks to everyone for your help, at least I learned a lot from this experience!

 

[SkyNetRising]

I went to cmd and ran diskpart, then list disk. Two showed, 0 and 1. 0 was 1863 GB with 1862 free. I selected drive 0, ran 'clean' and it said it was successful. Ran 'list disk' again and it showed 1863 GB with 1863 free.

Do those partitions actually get deleted after clean?
After performing diskpart clean, reboot your pc and check partitions.
If they are still there (with all the data), this means SSD has been locked out.
This happens after critical SMART parameter has been tripped. SSD needs to be replaced then.