I have just collected a asus laptop from a client as it would not boot passed the bios, message was hard drive not found.
Put in a linux usb, boots fine and lets me access the system and I can now see the hard drive, ran a boot repair from the linux disk options says sucessful but still no boot. After mounting each partition on the ssd marked fat, windows, system recovery everything is totally blank, but the drives are showing as fine no problem.
I have swapped out the ssd and installed a normal hard drive as there was space to fit, the connection was sata, and speed is not an issue with 8 gb memory.
Installed lmde 64 bit on the new drive and everything works as expected.
So my question is about ssd drives, is it normal the drive is empty on a fail ?
Should I try installing lmde on the ssd
File recovery software shows nothing to recover
My client would not know how to format a drive, even in error, she just uses for email and web surfing
The laptop was on windows 10 and would not meet the spec for 11 so its mint or throw away. She has 2 other laptops that also dont match 11 so will do them all to mint if she is happy with the change.
As it’s a “FAIL”, I think anything can be “normal”, which is usually not normal
I’ve seen SSD dying few times.
Once it was my own, after it broke, it just showed up as satafirm-something in BIOS.
In an other case the SSD got like write protected.
No that is fine just as you would expect
Small fat boot area
Windows files area
Recovery area
The windows area contained 4 folders but the files inside were just junk not of windows making names, open them and more junk inside. By that I mean strange character of symbols
Before when hard drives fail you can see the bad tracks and other fils can be recovered using the Fat or ntfs
OK, so you can detect the disk and mount it, and can see partitions, eg with df, but the partition contents are garbled rubbish.
So the disk controller must be working, and the partition table seems to know about the partitions, but the filesystems within each partition are damaged.
I think it is worth trying to reformat, or , if the client wants to recover files, try a recovery procedure first. @kovacslt knows about recovery procedures, I dont.
Installed a new hard disk not ssd as only have real disks in stock.
Installed lmde
Ran updates
Installed chrome and vlc
No problems
Tested it no problems
Went to show the client, 30 mins into the demo, wifi connections just going through control panel and system stopped, now will not boot, nothing totally dead.
Perhaps the ssd was not the source of tye problem but just a sign of a bigger issue
Sounds like…
Do run a long RAM test (memtest) for a night.
I bet it will not pass, but better to check.
Actually not that strange. If the flash memory goes wrong, anĂthing anywhere may become corrupted. Data in an SSD is not so “linearly” stored as in a HDD.
Depends on how the drive fails. My hard lesson was taught by a 750GB Samsung HDD. That was (seemed to be) perfect in a second, and in the other second it just clicked. Motor spinned, but just click-click-click…
That made me learn, any drive is subject to fail at any time, no matter it is a HDD, or a SSD.
Thanks @nevj , but I’m not an almighty
The drive has to work at least, so that I can touch it with dd , testdisk, photorec, etc..
My condolences…
If the motherboard is broken you cannot fix it.
It’s possible to replace, but for a llaptop it is hard to find a replacement, and most probably it does not worth even then…
My days of replacing laptop motherboards has finished.
The cost is too high
You cannot get hold of them as production stops and they move on to a new model
But mainly down to ribbon cable I no longer have the dexterity to do the small work. Fine on towers as they use real contact but ribbon no.
As I have both (desktop and laptop) I can tell that both of them have advantages and also disadvantages.
For example, a laptop is very easy to carry in a bag.
Ocassionally I use it like “on the field”, so when I need to do a low-cost live-broadcast, I take my latpop, and do the job with OBS - that’s OK for me up to 3 sources, like 2 cameras (wide angle and a close-up) and a presentation. (Anything more complex than that requires something like an Atem or similar device and a dedicated cameraman for each cameras, so beyon my lonely abilities…)
I’d hate to transport my desktop to a conference room to do basically the same thing
Or I can do some simple edits with Davinci Resolve, but this is just a theoretical possibility.
The laptop is much more frugal on energy, than my desktop, and my educated guess is that is true for the most laptops versus desktops.
Of course, regarding (computing) performance the laptop is nowhere near that of the desktop…
The desktop can do just everything I need from a computer, and it’s easy to upgrade, change some parts (like nVidia → Radeon ), it is generally a good performant, runs Resolve very good. It’s just at a fixed position.
A laptop is hard to upgrade (sometimes even impossible - think of soldered RAMs).
It is compact, portable, requires (much) less energy, but is a fixed configuration. Maybe memory and HDD/SSD may be upgradable.
A desktop is much more flexible regarding components, basically anything can be replaced easily - but there are branded desktops, wich contain a non-standard MoBo, or power supply.
So I like (and use) both of them.
What I don’t like is the tablet device (I’m sure someone is going to disagree ), I find it too big to carry in a pocket, too small to look at complex webpages, too underpowered to do real office-like things -spreadsheet, etc.)
True for the most part, unless you get a gaming laptop, then you get a more performant CPU as well as peripherals. I have a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop, ant it performs in a manner similar to my desktop computer, so i use it more than I do my desktop, because it’s right here where I am, and I can keep it plugged in most of the time, so battery life’s not an issue either.
), it is generally a good performant, runs Resolve very good. It’s just at a fixed position.