Troubleshooting SSD Boot Issues: A Personal Experience

Recently, I embarked on an exciting journey of upgrading my laptop by installing a new SSD and setting up a fresh operating system. For the initial three days, everything ran seamlessly. Unfortunately, today I encountered a perplexing issue: my computer refused to boot, displaying an error message stating, “Required device not found.”

Upon attempting to troubleshoot the problem, I ran into a brick wall. Recovery mode was inaccessible, and even when I opened Command Prompt using a bootable media, I discovered something troubling through DiskPart: while the SSD was recognized as online, its partitions were inexplicably offline. This raised an immediate question: how could this happen?

Desperate to resolve the issue, especially since I had minimal data stored on the drive, I took the last resort of cleaning the SSD, converting it to GPT format, and reinstalling Windows. My device is a Dell G3 3579, equipped with a WD NVMe M.2 SSD.

In reflecting on this experience, I’m eager to understand the underlying cause of this boot failure to prevent a recurrence in the future. Any insights or suggestions from fellow tech enthusiasts would be greatly appreciated!

Update on the Situation

After some investigation, I discovered that while using DiskPart, the disk itself showed as online; however, the two partitions were marked as offline yet still remained in a healthy state. This led to a consensus among those I consulted: it appeared that the SSD might have been unintentionally disconnected, causing the volumes to be dismounted—a mysterious situation with undisclosed reasons.

For those experiencing similar challenges, I promise to keep this post updated with any further insights that may come to light. I appreciate the community’s support as we navigate these technical puzzles together. Thank you for your attention, and feel free to share your thoughts!