Re: windows10 disk not showing up

[George N. White III]

On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 10:37, Neal Becker <ndbecker2(a)gmail.com&gt; 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.

-- 
George N. White III