When starting work this morning, I suddenly got a blue
screen of death error on my laptop, which disappeared before I could scan the
QR code with my phone. When I attempted to turn it back on, I was greeted by the
message “Boot Device Not Found Please install an operating system on your hard
disk.”
Unfortunately it’s the latest disaster concerning my laptop
and its hard disks. I bought the laptop in April 2020, so it really shouldn’t
be having these issues, it has an AMD Ryzen 5 3550H processor which has always
handled the workload I have given it. It has a fairly good graphics card, and I
upgraded the RAM and put a second SSD in.
In December I was unexpectedly given an error message saying
my boot drive was at risk of imminent failure due to excessive wear. I was able
to attach a new M2 drive to the laptop externally and clone the failing drive.
There was a slight issue with installing the cloned drive as I had to
disconnect my secondary SSD before installing the boot drive, and then open it
up and reconnect it. During that procedure I replaced the thermal grease around
my processor and cleaned the fans and everything seemed to be running
perfectly, until that boot drive completely failed.
It was a Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD, which the manufacturer
said was guaranteed for 300 TB written, or 5 years, whichever came first. My
main issue was being able to access a new one given that I have no
transportation, but the retailer was able to get a new one delivered to me within
3 hours of the failure.
During our course we had a project which allowed us to
research different hardware modules, so I had been happy to buy an NVMe SSD,
knowing it to be fast (so suited as a boot drive), future proof and reliable,
but this drive had failed within 4 months of installing it. And it was the
second such failure in that time. Research showed me that the most common
reason for failure was heat damage, and I had received a warning in December
that one of my fans wasn’t working properly, which prompted me to clean them
thoroughly. Upon further inspection, I realised that one of the fans was
slightly damaged, so I ordered a replacement.
I created a new Windows 10 USB boot drive using a different
laptop, and when the new drive arrived it was fairly straightforward to install
and load the OS. I was pleased to find that I had only lost progress on files
that had been open at the time, as my desktop and all my files are on my
secondary D drive, so I set about installing the programs I had lost. I
installed Core Temp and SpeedFan applications to investigate the thermal issue,
and I realised that I couldn’t hear my internal fans working at all over the
noise of my external fan. SpeedFan confirmed the issue, and I when I looked at
my BIOS settings I discovered that the “always on” setting had been disabled. I
have no idea when this was done, but it’s the probable cause for both failures.
I have lost a little bit of momentum on research while I
reinstall all my programs, and I will have to install the new fan when it
comes, but I am glad to have an answer and a working laptop again. I like to
build/upgrade computers and iPods (ie battery, flash memory and Bluetooth mod
upgrades) but it was a lot more stressful under these circumstances. I especially
enjoyed my hardware modules as I got to learn so much that I then applied to
building my son’s PC (Amd Ryzen 7 3700x processor, ROG GTX1060 graphics) and
planning “boring” upgrades for him like the power supply. I also enjoy making
sure everything has RGB flashing lights. It has generally been a lot less
intimidating opening machines up and knowing what I am looking at and more or
less what I am doing.
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