SSD issue ? can't boot or reinstall

[Hugh]

What does “locks gparted” mean exactly?

Live Linux systems sometimes find and use a swap partition on the hard drive (SSD).  This would interfere with some gparted operations on said hard drive.  You can explicitly stop it doing this (if it is a problem).

You may wish to run smartmontools from a live USB stick to check on the health of the SSD.

[eljuggy]

Hi,

well gparted stops responding when applying change to the SSD…

same for fdisk and hdparm

I managed to clear the SSD from all the partition using blkdiscard command http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/blkdiscard.8.html

Then Windows installer would boot from usb… but when trying to create a partition I would get an error “Windows cannot be installed on this disk, the disk may fail soon…”

I spent enough time trying to make the ssd work… at least I’m confident it is the only cause of the failure…

I ordered a 240gb ssd from aliexpress for 48 euros … after having opened my tablet with no damage 😉

[Hugh]

I imagine that replacing the drive is the right thing to do, but I don’t know for sure.

I cannot tell from the blkdiscard manual whether it can be used on a partition or if it only works on a whole drive.  I assume you asked it to do the whole disk.

I don’t know what a drive looks like to software after it has been wiped.  Does it look as if it is full of 0x00 or does it generate errors when software tries to read it or something else that I haven’t thought of?  Certainly it would not contain any partition information.

Once you do a blkdiscard, I recommend rebooting the live USB stick.  I’m not sure that the Linux kernel would reread the partition table if you don’t.  After rebooting, gparted should see an unpartitioned drive (and not hang).  If it hangs, that would seem to be a hardware problem.

I/O errors show up in dmesg output.  Even if gparted hangs, you should be able to start a terminal and use it to look at dmesg output.

[Brad]

One option you could try. Burn a USB bootable disk with the rEFInd boot manager using Etcher or other good ISO burning app. You can then boot from this which should allow you to boot any Linux distro installed on another plugged-in USB drive.  For example you could create a bootable USB version of Manjaro XFCE then boot that by having both USB drives plugged in – rEFInd and Manjaro. Then you would be running a full version of Manjaro Linux and have access to any/all Linux untilities to solve your problem.  Also, depending on your machine, you might find the Manjaro USB might boot by itself without the need to use the rEFInd USB.  I think Manjaro uses the GRUB boot manager.

more about me here

[Brad]

One option you could try. Burn a USB bootable disk with the rEFInd boot manager using Etcher or other good ISO burning app. You can then boot from this which should allow you to boot any Linux distro installed on another plugged-in USB drive.  For example you could create a bootable USB version of Manjaro XFCE then boot that by having both USB drives plugged in – rEFInd and Manjaro. Then you would be running a full version of Manjaro Linux and have access to any/all Linux utilities to solve your problem (might allow Gparted to work correctly).  Also, depending on your machine, you might find the Manjaro USB might boot by itself without the need to use the rEFInd USB.  I think Manjaro uses the GRUB boot manager.
To install a bootable version of Manjaro XFCE on USB you have two options:
1) burn and bootup the install ISO via Live USB and install onto a second USB destination drive. (easier)
2) Burn, bootup, and run the Manjaro Architect ISO and install to a second USB drive (more difficult, but you get the very latest distro/code)

more about me here

[Hugh]

@brad:

I assumed that he knew how to boot a distro from USB.  His gparted is running from a bootable usb stick and is a LINUX system.   He called it a “Gparted live USB”.  I guess it must be https://gparted.org/livecd.php

Whenever I need to use gparted in this fashion, I just boot Fedora or Ubuntu live USBs and run gparted (I have to “sudo dnf install gparted” on Fedora but that’s easy).

Does Manjaro not make a live USB image available?  The majaro pages don’t make this very clear.

[Brad]

Last time I tried a couple years ago, all the Live USB’s I created did not have data persistence (files saved were gone when you rebooted).
Manjaro allowed installing to a USB destination, so you end up with a bootable USB with a full OS version with data persistence same as if you had installed onto an HD.
Maybe other distro’s do this now? Or maybe when I tried before with Linux Mint I didn’t do it correctly?  Anyway. Having a full install of course is better so you can install other software/utilities from the distro’s app repository.
My thinking was that one could install other partition managers/tools and use that if Gparted is not working for some unknown reason.

more about me here

[Hugh]

The live .iso systems I use do not have persistence.  It used to be that the live USBs did have persistence (in the pre UEFI days) but were slightly more work to install.  And they had odd bugs.

I have installed Ubuntu onto a portable HDD but never ended up using it beyond testing whether it worked.  Windows used to forbid installing onto a portable drive but my understanding is that they’ve changed how licensing is verified and now allow this.

I don’t really need persistence.  I just scp stuff to/from another computer on my LAN.  Of course that requires me to type in the WPA2 password (mine is long).

The most irritating thing is that the content of my live USB sticks get destroyed by Windows if I let it boot.  That happens all too easily if you don’t hit the right keystroke at the right time during the POST step.  So I treat them as disposable.

[eljuggy]

Hi !

well my ssd arrived today and everything is now fine… a few hours to reinstall though : but I’ll use my guide  (click on the link) !!

thanks for your messages… and sorry I wasn’t around meanwhile…

[Cloppy]

How’s that new ssd going?

[Author]

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