SSD with Qubes stopped showing up

User Support Hardware Issues
#1

Hi, my Qubes has been running for 6 days and today I put a lot of stress on it because I didn’t notice I opened too many tabs, my disk load indicator on the bar was constantly lit, most likely paging came on and started attacking my drive, but I didn’t pay attention, Eventually my Qubes just froze, after 50 minutes I rebooted it and found that my SSD stopped showing up in both Bios and Grub, I switched cables and nothing changed, then I checked my SSD on several computers and the situation is the same, my Thinkpad gave me an “Error” message when I ran it with that SSD.

The SSD itself is good and I have been using it for a long time, but, often installed different OS and constantly reinstalling.

Can you please tell me if this is a Qubes related problem? Would it be better if I use XFS or BTRFS?

I understand the SSD is dead or can I try to flash it?

#2

If your SSD drive is dead due to many rewrites, there is probably not much that you can do. Perhaps, if there are still enough viable cells in it, you could reformat it with a smaller size using SSD tools, but that may not work either. When you buy an SSD, it comes with a maximum number of writes (usually expressed in terabytes over the lifetime of the drive). After that, it would have probably worn off most cells in it and becomes unreliable and/or inaccessible.

#3

Maybe your EFI boot entry was erased for some reason.
Try to boot from any Live OS or from Qubes installer in rescue mode and run this command there:
If your SSD is /dev/sda and EFI partition is 1 then:
efibootmgr -v -c -u -L Qubes -l /EFI/qubes/grubx64.efi -d /dev/sda -p 1

#4

Might not relate. Long ago I had an SSD on an Apple Mac Book Pro which would get confused, and not show up. It was nearly new so that did not seem an issue. That SSD had its own Firmware to accomplish what used to be called TRIM. To prevent the constant overwriting of one small part of the SSD. I found an Apple App which repaired the structure of disc drives. I only had to start the program, not tell it to fix anything, and it would sort out whatever problem was in the computer firmware which caused it not to see the drive.

Old version of Apple OS,and I do not recall the name of the software which fixed drive.

However. Hold your nose. Put a USB which installs Windows 10 onto computers. Windows 10 can recognize nearly any hardware. By just starting the USB, not writing to the SSD. The computer might start seeing the SSD.

How often did you completely power down the computer. Not sleep mode. Power down. Six days? Power down so the drive can sort out its file structure.