Lenovo M Series workstation goes into a boot loop upon start and gives a 1962 no operating system error. When I pulled the SSD out and put it in a USB dock, it will not even show up in windows file explorer on my computer.
I can get past the 1962 error and get the machine to start up but when i go to use a cloning software, they all are getting similar errors. Acronis wont install on this machine, it errors. AOMEI doesnt even see the HDD, it isnt even on the list and another Minitool Partition wizard tells me there is some windows boot file error.
The customer needs me to make an image of this disk but i cant get any cloning software to either run or see the disk. I can copy files to an external hard drive but it seems like cloning just wont work.
On a side note, I put a different SSD in the lenovo machine and it booted up no problem. So it seems this SSD is failing? Whats going on here?
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Can you DDresue / GDDrescue the raw disk?
Or does the controller board of it flaking out?
Like, sector errors you can recover around, but a flakey controller chip, might need a new donor board, and move the (bios?) chip or whatever handles the tables I saw the HDD in the middle of the post, and forgot it was an SSD. My bad
the controller is integral to the drive, I think…
Yeah, ive used 4 different types of cloning software and they either just plain wont install or they wont see the drive. So weird, as im obviously in windows 10 using it. Also, it wont connect to one drive either. I’m doing a manual file transfer to an external hard drive and when i try to run chrome, it wont even open. If i ask it to do more than one thing at a time it just plain wont. Does that sound like a bad controller on the SSD?
The drive you are checking, is mounted read only?
I’d use at least a live CD, if you don’t have a Linux install to try and recover what you can.
but you do you
wait, are you using a failing machine?
or have pulled the drives?
Does the system have bitlocker?
The machine is up and running. It doesnt boot normally, i have to restart it multiple times or boot manually from the SSD then it boots to desktop normally.
It is not encrypted, no.
I have pulld the drive and plugged it into my own computer just for fun with a USB dock and it sees absolutely nothing and whats weirder is when i go to try to eject it it gives an error. this is on a windows 10 machine. I then put the USB dock on my windows 11 machine and it doenst even show an eject option when i try to eject. very unusual.
I presume there is some Windows log files, like you get output on DMESG on bad drive connection.
Perhaps it is in the computer management then logs?
Really don’t want the drive writeable, as windows will try and update file access times and such when copying files, and other stuff that might make any problem worse with a failing drive?
Acronis has the ability to create “Bootable Media” on a flash drive and boot from it without having to install it on the problematic machine.
It’s the same with Rescuzilla.
If both don’t see the drive then you have a big problem. Or the disk has already died / is dying in a moment and the data can be written off.
If the data is worth $ then send it to someone who does deep data recovery even bypassing the controller.
P.S
If the drive starts to die, never tire it with more writes!
Boot into the appropriate recovery boot medium and cross your fingers.
P.S2
Are you sure you can rule out problems at the OS layer? What does smart say?
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For sure Tim,
This very well looks like a hard drive that is dead/dying. I installed the cloning software and 2 of them told me they couldnt see the drive and to restart and after restart the software was gone.
At the same time, the customer owns an auto repair shop and uses certain software to keep track of customer’s jobs. He has the software running on another machine and really I think only wanted the desktop full of icons. He has experience working on computers…25 years ago… and was acting like a know it all and throwing me curve balls. It’s so very hard to read customers, especially ones that “know what they are talking about.” Its like well then why the he77 are you coming to me? Either way I can get all the files over to an external hard drive. I told the guy the SSD controller is dead and there is no cloning. Lol. This job is being charged appropriately, i can tell you that much.
I kind of expected the drive was bad after all the troubleshooting I went through but he charged me to try again and thats when i asked you guys. all you guys did was back up what i already know. And I thank you fine gentlemen and women for the backup.
Have a good day my good people! Thank you.
On a side note, I put a different SSD in the lenovo machine and it booted up no problem. So it seems this SSD is failing? Whats going on here?
When you say this, did you install windows onto the drive, or was it a drive with an existing OS volume on it?
AOMEI doesnt even see the HDD, it isnt even on the list and another Minitool Partition wizard tells me there is some windows boot file error
This tickles the brain and the area of “Lenovo has garbage preconfigured BIOS and the disk may have been an RST raid volume”. It’s been a week though, so no worries it seems
For future reference, you can disable automatic drive mounting within Windows by running diskpart automount disable to stop automatic mounting, it can degrade further from these operations. You’ll have to manually turn this back on with diskpart automount enable afterwards for mediums to mount automatically again. (It’s likely not the reason for not being able to see the medium, though.)
Glad to see you’re taking on more complex stuff though! That’s where the learning is done 
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