On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 12:58, Neal Becker <ndbecker2@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for all the suggestions. Just to review, the issue was the drive didn't even appear in lsblk, so nothing can be done to fix it.

until you find a way to make it visible to linux. The ATA1 you mentioned is a hint that the BIOS may have lost the settings. Windows repair may have reconfigured the settings after detecting a problem, in which case the drive should probably be replaced. Best case is that the BIOS settings (which are maintained in CMOS by a replaceable battery) were lost due to failure of the battery (there are lots of youtube videos for Lenovo CMOS battery replacement).

It is possible it was partially failing, it seems after multiple windows reboots and repairs it is working again, although
at least one app had to be reinstalled. I only use linux myself, so I know nothing about windows or how to diagnose it.
So my real question was not how to fix the drive, but why it doesn't even show up on linux.
Thanks
Neal

Drives rarely "partially fail". They work until they fall off a cliff, so yours may be falling into the abyss and the

end result won't be pretty.

Some systems have multiple drive support modes, with names like IDE and AHCI. Both Windows and linux don't deal well with changes to BIOS. One post mentioned raid. https://askubuntu.com/questions/696413/ubuntu-installer-cant-find-any-disk-on-dell-xps-13-9350 gives another example. https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-enable-ahci-mode-for-sata-in-the-bios-without-reinstalling-windows.htm has enough detail that a linux user should be able to survive a a bit of windows exposure.

It is tricky (and tedious) to change the BIOS setting without causing problems for Windows, so your best bet would be to run drive diagnostics ( I use smartmontools, but https://www.windowscentral.com/how-check-if-hard-drive-failing-smart-windows-10 has other options) in Windows to decide if the drive is viable.

Computer manufacture these days is quite reproducible, so given model can suffer from some commonly encountered failure mode that you can find on Google.

On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 6:26 PM George N. White III <gnwiii@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 10:37, Neal Becker <ndbecker2@gmail.com> wrote:
Today my wife's windows10 lenovo laptop was not starting normally, cycling through various "repair" screens. It does seem to work at least
minimally though.

I've seen this with older version of Windows. The "repair" may have repaired the "original" Windows boot configuration, but the
need for the repair is most likely due to a failing drive. Using the USB live stick you should be able to install smartmontools to check the drive.

I tried booting of my f32 usb stick and thought maybe I could take a look at the SSD. But when I start gnome disks, the internal SSD doesn't
show up! lsblk doesn't show it. I looked through journalctl and saw some reference to ATA1, and I believe some kind of error.

Anyone have any idea what's going on? The SSD is working enough to boot windows and run various things like file manager, so why doesn't it
show in linux?

Windows may have messed with "BIOS" settings in an attempt to recover from a problem.

How old is the drive? SSD bits have a limited lifetime. Some workloads (video production) that fill, empty, and refill the drive very hard on SSD's. Wear leveling strategies try to make the wear even across all the bits, and there are spares when a bit goes bad, but eventually the spares are used up and you lose data in some high-wear area. You should use ddrescue to image the drive and attempt repairs on the image rather than tying to do repairs on a failing drive.

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George N. White III

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