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Should a bad m.2 SSD prevent the BIOS from finishing?
My 3-month old 8910 died over the weekend; pressing the PSU diagnostic on the back and getting nothing pointed to an issue with the PSU.
Technician came out yesterday, swapped the PSU and motherboard and we couldn't get past the BIOS screen.
Technician came back today, once again swapped PSU and motherboard, no change. He got the idea to pull the m.2 SSD and suddenly we could get past the BIOS.
This is probably a dumb question, but should this even be possible? I thought the BIOS was independent of "what's plugged in". Comments?
p.s. If anyone know of an adapter (USB, SATA) for the Samsung PRO 950 please let me know as I'd like to see if I can recover data off of the unit. Thanks
ejn63
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March 9th, 2017 04:00
The answer is yes - a bad drive CAN prevent boot, since the UEFI system stores data on the hard drive or SSD. If that data is corrupt, it can prevent boot.
About the only way you'll be able to read the drive is to get the system up and running on a new drive and mount the old one in the other M.2 socket - or install a PCI Express adapter that will take the M.2 NVMe drive.
banderson1962
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March 9th, 2017 09:00
Thanks for that answer. To clarify - with the SSD in place I can't even use F2 or F12 to get into system menus; should that be possible? In the meantime I'll reinstall the OS on a hard drive and try to add the SSD after the fact. Thanks.
ejn63
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March 9th, 2017 10:00
It is possible, yes. What happens if you remove the NVMe drive from the boot list?
banderson1962
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March 10th, 2017 19:00
Removing it allows full boot. I got a PCI adapter from Amazon and tried it that way, still won't get past the logo screen. Looks like I'm off to find a data recovery firm...
banderson1962
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March 10th, 2017 19:00
To be clear, the PCI adapter was not set as a boot device.