WHEA uncorrectable error BSOD leading to unrecognized Sata SSD #1

[Ark-One]

Hello!

I bought a 15.6" Cosmos Series laptop a few years ago, in late 2020, which fell during the covid period, when there was a shortage in elements. (Had to send my laptop back twice for repairs because of faulty ones.)

It kept having its ups and downs until some point where it started acting up. It actually came to a boiling point where the hardware seems to have suffered some damages.

For reference : I do not use my laptop a lot but I use it for work when I'm home or some games but it amounts to a total of maximum 2 days per week. I added a 16gb ram stick to it if it can be any useful information.

A few more ago, while using my laptop, I had a "WHEA uncorrectable error", which I have NEVER seen in my life before. The first suspect element is that the BSOD percentage before resetting didn't go above 0%. It remained as such for a few minutes before rebooting. Then, it gave me the error message "No drive to boot". Since then, it refuses to detect my SSD (the #1 which is just a 1TB stick with chips and not the square one).

I checked the bios for hints and I saw that it isn't detected there either.

I opened the laptop and removed it, cleaned the plugs, blew air in the slot and put it back. It seems to still be powered, because a red light on it started blinking when I booted the laptop. It is just not detected.

I also tried removing the battery, the clock battery and holding the power button for 15s before plugging it all back and booting. Nothing new so far.

This is very dire because I have work on it, which I 80% backed up, but there will still be some losses. Does anyone have any idea? It is weird and frustrating that this happened one month after the end of my warranty because it means I'll have to pay for everything in this repair, which, as a student, isn't the perfect spot. But I would like some guidance on what's going on. I added a pic of my setup, but please remember that there only is an extra 16gb ram stick which I also tried to boot without, to no avail.

(It is in French, sorry. If there is anything misunderstood, please tell me and I will translate.)

Thanks in advance for the time you will give this post.

 

[Martinr36]

Sounds as though the drive has died, stick a new one in in, clean install windows (upgrade to W11), and hopefully you should be good to go

 

[ubuysa]

I agree with @Martinr36, that sounds 100% like an SSD failure, though it could also be the laptop motherboard. WHEA is the Windows Hardware Error Architecture, it's the component that gets control when there is a critical hardware problem. It always BSODs, so that we can establish what happened from the resulting memory dump. Obviously though, if the failing component is the system drive (dumps are written to the paging file) then the BSOD process will fail too.

SSDs do fail so that's by far the most likely cause. Unfortunately they generally fail catastrophically and there is likely a 0% chance of getting any data off it. You could try plugging it into an M.2 caddy and see whether a different PC/laptop can read it, you might get lucky.

 

[Ark-One]

Hello,

Thank you @Martinr36 and @ubuysa for your replies.

I do not have a caddy for this one, because it is unfortunately not the regular L shaped sata port. It looks like this.

(Not the same brand, of course)

So I have no adapter, unlike the other more common sata type that I do have one for.

So even if the hard drive lights up on the motherboard, meaning it is powered, it still means that it is cooked? That is actually the worst case I could ever face if so. I backed up 80% of my files, just that this falling right before another backup is painful.

Also, I stuck to W10 because I wasn't feeling using W11 when 10 still had some updates and was still useful to me. Do I need to upgrade or is it an option? If necessary, of course, I will update it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hello,

Thank you @Martinr36 and @ubuysa for your replies.

I do not have a caddy for this one, because it is unfortunately not the regular L shaped sata port. It looks like this. View attachment 39800
(Not the same brand, of course)

So I have no adapter, unlike the other more common sata type that I do have one for.

So even if the hard drive lights up on the motherboard, meaning it is powered, it still means that it is cooked? That is actually the worst case I could ever face if so. I backed up 80% of my files, just that this falling right before another backup is painful.

Also, I stuck to W10 because I wasn't feeling using W11 when 10 still had some updates and was still useful to me. Do I need to upgrade or is it an option? If necessary, of course, I will update it.

Thanks in advance!

SSDs are silicon chips, so when they fail it’s because the chip has fried, you generally can’t do anything about that.

They’re the M2 format, the old SATA drives aren’t really used anymore, certainly not in laptops, they’re about 1/10th of the speed so too slow for modern use.

You can get a caddy for an M2 drive same as any other.

If reliability was important, we would never have recommended a PCS drive in the first place as they are prone to failure.

Plus you should never have your Data on the OS drive to avoid this very issue, you should always have a separate drive for data.

Windows 10 is going out of support in under a year, there really is zero benefit to not updating to windows 11 now, it’s a far better OS

 

[Martinr36]

here's a very nice little caddy for M.2, I've got 2 of these

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DNR22Q7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Ark-One]

SSDs are silicon chips, so when they fail it’s because the chip has fried, you generally can’t do anything about that.

They’re the M2 format, the old SATA drives aren’t really used anymore, certainly not in laptops, they’re about 1/10th of the speed so too slow for modern use.

You can get a caddy for an M2 drive same as any other.

If reliability was important, we would never have recommended a PCS drive in the first place as they are prone to failure.

Plus you should never have your Data on the OS drive to avoid this very issue, you should always have a separate drive for data.

Windows 10 is going out of support in under a year, there really is zero benefit to not updating to windows 11 now, it’s a far better OS

I am confused, I shouldn’t have taken a PCS hard drive because they are prone to failure? I don’t remember having many other options when ordering my laptop. And I’m a bit confused reading this from someone on their own forum, let alone an admin. 😅

My data was 80% backed up, since I plan them every two weeks, if not sent on cloud servers. I have a 1To drive on the side to store them so no giant losses. Some files might be forever lost if this is unrecoverable. It is mildly frustrating but not a giant loss.

Roger that, I’ll update to W11 if I ever get the chance to get everything back in order. It just is the spending that will be very setting me back.

Thank you for your replies, everyone. I’ll update the post when something comes up.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I am confused, I shouldn’t have taken a PCS hard drive because they are prone to failure? I don’t remember having many other options when ordering my laptop. And I’m a bit confused reading this from someone on their own forum, let alone an admin.

I'm not an admin, I'm a mod. There are lots of options of different makes and models of SSDs, from Samsung, Corsair and SolidGM. The PCS branded one is the budget level, it's only really for very entry level builds, would never be suggested otherwise.

My data was 80% backed up, since I plan them every two weeks, if not sent on cloud servers. I have a 1To drive on the side to store them so no giant losses. Some files might be forever lost if this is unrecoverable. It is mildly frustrating but not a giant loss.

What you need to do is get a second drive, your data should never be on the C drive at any time, that's a huge no no and has been for some time.

 

[Martinr36]

take a read of this

Why more than one storage drive?

I've been meaning to put something like this together for a while. In recent weeks I've found myself writing this more and more so thought I would just post my thoughts in a thread that I could link to. So the reason for this thread is to try and give insight as to the reasoning behind having...

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

 

[ubuysa]

I am confused, I shouldn’t have taken a PCS hard drive because they are prone to failure? I don’t remember having many other options when ordering my laptop. And I’m a bit confused reading this from someone on their own forum, let alone an admin. 😅

Any electronic device can fail at any time. It's generally true that you get better reliability from quality vendors but that's not to say that the PCS SSD is rubbish, because it's not. You were just unlucky.

My data was 80% backed up, since I plan them every two weeks, if not sent on cloud servers. I have a 1To drive on the side to store them so no giant losses. Some files might be forever lost if this is unrecoverable. It is mildly frustrating but not a giant loss.

My data is 100% backed up - every night, twice in fact - by a batch job run as a scheduled task. I write an image of the system drive to an external HDD (which is only online during the backup) and I keep the most recent 14 images - just in case. My user data is synchronised to a different partition on the same external HDD (which is only online during the backup). My user data is also synchronised with my cloud service, just in case something happens to the external HDD. I use ransomware protection on all backups - the backup won't run if critical files (that never change) have been modified.

I used to work in OS support in large IBM mainframe data centres. When you are responsible for the user data of over 5,000 users any loss of data - in fact any unplanned loss of service - will mean you're looking for another job. That kind of environment focusses the mind.

You cannot have too many backups and you cannot backup too often.