Hi Bill,

It does sound like a faulty laptop motherboard, i.e. the sata connection.

When running from your usb install, what does 'dmesg' report after you have plugged in either of the problematic ssd drives?

If you get some new output from 'dmesg' you should be able to determine the drive letter/assignment and use 'fdisk' to re-partition.

It's unlikely that both ssd drives and both adapters are faulty so the laptop loooks like the culprit and a faulty internal sata connection may have messed with the drives format but accessing via usb should enable some sort of recovery. Having said that, we have no idea _exactly_ what has happened to cuase your issues.

Cheers,
Mike.
--

On 08/09/2024 07:18, William Morder via tde-users wrote:

On Saturday 07 September 2024 10:26:55 E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:

On Sat, 7 Sep 2024 08:53:54 -0700

William Morder via tde-users <users@trinitydesktop.org> wrote:

My internal 2 tb SSD has suddenly become "locked"; even though I myself
didn't lock it. The good people at Mc$haft started nagging me about
enabling UEFI partitioning, but I had managed to get round that by using
grub instead.

[...]

This newer SSD, where for the past couple
years I have had my system installed, been running fine, will not boot at
all.

Is this a Samsung SSD?  The reason I ask is that they've had issues
recently: some 970/980/990 SSDs were shipped with bad firmware that causes
them to age and die prematurely.  A firmware update was published, but it
only prevents further premature aging and doesn't fix drives that have
already died, from what I understand.  (There are also rumours of some
batches of 870 EVOs being flaky, but I don't think that was ever confirmed
by the manufacturer.)

If your drive is one of the affected Samsung models, you may be out of
luck, although your description of the failure doesn't match the most
common manifestation of this issue, which has the drive dropping to
read-only.

E. Liddell

I am replying here, as this was the last response that I got; not ignoring 
Felix, Nik, et al. 

Well, so I went across town and dug out my SATA/SSD connector tools out of 
storage. It turns out that I have not just one, but two of them, and they are 
both USB 3.0, so I assume that they are pretty up-to-date, even though I 
haven't used them at all in a couple years. They have just been sitting tight 
in a sealed plastic bag. 

Neither of these SSDs are recognized by my machine, using either connector. 
(Don't know what they are properly called, but there is a picture in that 
links that Felix sent: 

https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rcuc-16001/p/N82E16812119874
https://web.archive.org/web/20240907172904/https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rcuc-16001/p/N82E16812119874

Mine look pretty much the same, except my brands are, respectively, StarTech 
and Sabrent. 

The internal SSDs are, respectively, a Samsung 2 tb, 970 EVO Plus, and the 
factory-installed 128 gb SSD, don't know a brand name, other than that it 
shipped installed with a Lenovo Ideapad 3.15 laptop, and was never used. 

Only when this Samsung 2 tb SSD started misbehaving, then I tried out the 
factory-installed SSD, and that only seemed to make things worse, as now I 
cannot use either one, nor even get my machine to recognize them. 

When the Samsung is installed as the internal drive in my system, it is 
locked, and I cannot get into my system at all; When the factory SSD is 
installed as the internal drive, I get the startup menu trying to get me to 
register my "new" machine, which is now of course at least 2 years old. 

It may be that I can take these drives to somebody who knows better, and get 
them wiped clean, reformatted, breathe some new life into them. Otherwise, 
this 2 tb Samsung is a waste of money and time, as I just barely managed to 
back up all my data (and not as organized and neatly as I would like) before 
everything went to hell. 

At present I have install my entire system on a 256 gb flash drive, complete 
with root, swap and home partitions, with no internal hard drive at all. I 
boot from grub, and superstitiously avoiding UEFI and everything from 
Mc$haft, the rotten Apple, or other similar places of origin. 

Any ideas about how to proceed are welcome. I can look around for a new 
laptop, but I think that it will just be more of the same. I hesitate to put 
another SSD in my machine, as I fear that I will get caught in that same 
endless loop again. 

Well, at least I didn't lose any data, and all my work is still intact. I am 
once again considering how feasible it would be to move into a cave up in the 
mountains, buying a solar panel setup, using stone tools, and living as a 
hermit. 

Bill








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