I’ve been running Fedora on an XPS 15 7590 for several years now, but just recently the ssd started being not found at boot. While I’m trying to get it working again I just don’t trust it any more so I’m currently looking over my options. I’ll add some more details of the situation in the spoiler below.
ssd issue details
The ssd appears to have died overnight after I believe the laptop overheated. While it is not recognized during boot no matter what I have tried it does show up when I boot to a live usb after I switched the bios settings to ahci from raid which it was apparently on by default.
Oddly, testdisk and other diagnostics that I’ve been able to run claim it is in perfect health. I am thus currently uncertain if the issue is in fact with the ssd or if it is somewhere along the line in the connection to the ssd. This is relevant because it would make replacing the ssd pointless, but I don’t know how to troubleshoot any further to figure it out at this point. Advice would be welcome on this front too.
My questions are:
a) Is it more sensible to simply buy a replacement ssd and hope that solves the problem despite the worries/doubts I have expressed in the above details, or do I accept that computer prices are never coming down again and I might as well suck it up and buy a new laptop now since they’re only ever going to get more expensive.
b) If I am to buy a new laptop now, what should that be? My budget is relatively tight at the moment, but a laptop is a valuable tool that will get much use and is worth investing in. I use one mostly for basic web dev work and light gaming, and media consumption. I have been looking primarily at Framework and System76 options but am open to other suggestion if people have them. I’ll add more details on my thoughts below.
laptop thoughts details
Framework: I understand that the ceo has gotten some flak and that they have given funding to some projects led by unpleasant people. I don’t like that, but I find myself doubtful that any other major laptop companies hands are all that more clean and I’ve got to buy from somewhere. I do also quite like their modularity and upgradability/reparability which could help me avoid a situation like this in the future.
System76: I like what I know of them and even if they aren’t necessarily the most price competitive I do respect that they’ve been a player in pushing linux hardware for some time now and I wouldn’t mind rewarding that. I’m not that interested in PopOS though.
Tuxedo Computer: I also like what I know of them (little as that is) but the shipping from Germany to Canada is killer. That said, I haven’t looked into the current import fees from the states with the ongoing trade bullshit so maybe it comes out in the wash a bit more than I think.
Dell XPS: While it’s done well by me for the most part there are a few gripes I’ve had with my current laptop and I’m not sure if I want to go back to that same well.
Thinkpads: So many damn models I’m a bit lost. I know some people love them though.
That’s all I’ve got in mind but I’d love to hear about any other options people know about that I should consider.
Thanks for any advice!
In a live enviornment does the disk show any partitions? Maybe your boot partition is somehow corrupted.
From the terminal in the live enviornment run lsblk
Output should look something like this (sorry formatting)
user@pc ~ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk /home
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 1G 0 part /boot
├─sdb2 8:18 0 32G 0 part
├─sdb3 8:19 0 64G 0 part
Ya, I get
this
when I run lsblk, and
this
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 238.47 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors Disk model: PC SN520 NVMe WDC 256GB Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: B7455548-7C25-4CAD-8783-51BD02CDFD1E Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 1230847 1228800 600M EFI System /dev/nvme0n1p2 1230848 3327999 2097152 1G Linux extended boot /dev/nvme0n1p3 3328000 500117503 496789504 236.9G Linux filesystem GPT PMBR size mismatch (6579459 != 60437491) will be corrected by write. The backup GPT table is not on the end of the device.when I run sudo fdisk -l. (minus the bits concerning other disks)
A corrupt boot partition is one of my new leading theories. I’m really hoping that’s the case actually.
Your nvme drive has a partition table, but the backup table isn’t at the end of the disk, and none of the partitions are loaded (only the parent disk, nvme0n1, shows up with lsblk, where it should show nvme0n1p1-3 under it). The partition table at the beginning is readable, but the rest might not be. Looks like it might be a failed/failing disk as you suggested, which luckily is a simple fix.
Run
dmesgand look for errors related to the nvme device (dmesg | grep nvmefor a quick filter).Feel that the partition table looks good there, might just be a bios setting to get this booting again.
You could always mount these partitions and take a peek at the files, cd and ls with nano / vi on relevant files that are human readable.
Secureboot is my gut feeling, possibly paired with a side of CSM as to what’s prohibiting your system from booting. Could be the /boot partition is cooked too but looks like it’s at least there and listed.
From remoting into one of my systems reading a file via nano in /boot/loader/entries
Believe the same thing as you are experiencing has happened to me on my x99-WS-IPMI board due to its age. Hopefully the CMOS battery is easy enough for you to replace on your board, if that’s the failure.