Existing SSD does not show up and cannot be accessed

Question

Hello - I would be appreciative of any help to get my SSD consistently being accessible. Sys info included below.

Shortly after upgrading to Win/11, my SSD (Samsung 860 QVO 1TB) disappeared. The drive had been working fine with no apparent problems. Did some searches and found suggestion to run diagnostics from boot menu (F12 at startup). Diag did not find any problems. Rebooted and SSD showed up and could be accessed. Thought problem solved. Wrong. SSD disappeared again. Ran diagnostics from boot menu a couple of times before SSD would show back up. This has continued to happen until now, SSD doesn't reappear at all. Drivers are all current. Firmware on SSD is current. BIOS is current. Samsung Magician (Software from SSD vendor to manage SSD) does not find the SSD. The data provided by running "System Information" from the search bar does not show the SSD (I believe this is data provided from BIOS). At this point, I'm at a loss about what to do next.

Do I reset BIOS back to factory settings? Is there another way to reinitialize BIOS? Is this even a BIOS issue?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Mark

System Information:

Computer purchased in 2019 with SSD installed

ejn63 · Answer

Unplug the system, disconnect the battery from the mainboard and hold the power button for 30 sec. Then remove and reinstall the SSD.

Reassemble and boot the system -- make a complete backup if you don't already have one.

Then run a full diagnostic on the drive. It sounds very likely the drive is on its way out.

mazimm · Answer

Hi ejn63 - thanks for your reply!

I planned to do what you suggested, but when I turned on my computer, the SSD had reappeared. So I made a backup of the SSD and started running diagnostics using Windows utilities and Samsung's software provided for their SSD (called Magician). Everything I ran came back saying no errors were found and everything looked good. I took screen shots of the results of the various tests and other configuration settings and included them in the attached file. I wasn't sure what you were implying when you said "Then run a full diagnostic on the drive." but I ran all the tests I could think of.

Since everything was checking out, I thought I would apply the latest Win/11 update, version 23H2. My thinking was, if everything is now showing up, then running a windows update should be able to bring everything back up after the update is applied. Well, it did that! I ran the update and when it rebooted after applying the update, the SSD was there and everything appeared to be working correctly.

Then I thought, since everything is working, I will reboot and look at the bios and see if anything seems to be missing. Honestly, I had no idea what to look for and only had a foggy idea of what was contained in the bios. So I looked at the bios and didn't see anything and exited and the system rebooted. When it came back up, the SSD was missing.

What am I missing? Initially, the SSD reappears, all the testing and diags I ran show the drive working fine with no indication of anything failing or getting ready to fail. I apply an update and when it reboots the SSD is still there but do another reboot and it disappears!?!!

I'm willing to go through the steps you mentioned but there has been no indication the drive is failing or getting ready to fail. Is there some other diagnostic I should run against the drive - you might need to be pretty specific because I thought I had run everything I could think of?

Also, is there some way to reinitialize the SSD so the system relearns about it and can reconfigure itself to make sure it is set up correctly? It just seems like something is missing somewhere... but where and how would you go about resetting it?

Thanks again for your help, it is much appreciated!

Mark

Sorry, I guess you can't add a file so I'll include a couple of screen shots

Inspiron

Existing SSD does not show up and cannot be accessed

Was this post helpful?