Operating system was not found
This is about two events which occured to me this year.
Directly spoiling what happended:
- My Dell Laptop did switch its SSD from AHCI to Intel RAID
- A fresh linux install on a Optiplex 7040 does not work, because UEFI implementations only consider MS Windows
Dell Laptop SSD issue
I am typically not shutting my laptop for daily tasks.
My Dell Latitude 5511 has a good enough battery for me to work half a day and then spend a while at the charger, during night, it loses 5-10% of battery charge while in suspend mode.
One day, I kept a USB device plugged in over night at the laptop and did not attach the charger to the laptop. Normally, this should not stop the laptopt from suspending, yet it made the device go dark.
The next morning, I plugged my laptop to the charger and started it. It said “An operating system was not found”. Well fuck, the SSD was not listed as being bootable or as a boot option.
So I did the typical things to see why nothing boots:
- check if booting from USB works
- check if secure boot is in the way or some other BIOS setting
- wait for the battery to charge
Nothing helped. I had a similar Dell laptop device at hand, which I unscrewed and switched the SSDs:
The NVMe of the other (Dell Latitude 5500) worked fine in the 5511, and the NVMe SSD of the 5500 did as well not work in the 5511. Weird.
SSD firmware reset
I then found this funny post, telling how one can recover a SSD (even NVMe) by resetting the SSD firmware:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
The method is as follows:
- Boot into UEFI/BIOS
- Let it sit for 30 minutes at the BIOS screen
- then power down for 30 seconds and repeat.
This is also mentioned here in this reddit post, which also has an explaination:
It’s all about powering the SSD with only SATA power, and no SATA data, for a long period of time (some guides say 20 minutes, this guy says 30 minutes twice). Apparently there’s some universal “factory reset” feature in all SSDs, where if they detect power but no data for several minutes, they’ll begin erasing all non-data related stuff, like cache, firmware, etc on the disk - these parts can become corrupted after a power transient and cause your SSD to fail, or even your whole PC to not post with the SSD plugged in. The “power cycle” trick engages this “reset mode” of your SSD, where it will wipe everything except your actual data - your data will be fine.
But while I was in the BIOS menu, I saw that the SSD was found correctly in the BIOS information (I have not checked that before).
Finally Solved
This made me tinker a little more. I saw that the “SATA operation” entry was set to “RAID On” (which is some Dell/Intel proprietary raid mode, which is useless as I only have a single disk). Switching this back to AHCI fixed my issue.
Great. Everything is solved.
But wait:
The NVMe of the other (Dell Latitude 5500) worked fine in the 5511, and the NVMe SSD of the 5500 did as well not work in the 5511.
Why did it work that way around? The 5500 apparently had its SATA operation set to “RAID on” during install, and therefore works that way. Seems like I did not switch it to the recommended AHCI (which makes the system bootable on non-dell devices as well).
Up to story number two
Dell Optiplex Debian Install Issues
I successfully installed Debian on a Optiplex 7040 and wanted to boot into the system.
It did not boot into the just created only existing UEFI boot entry. Removing and readding the boot entry in the BIOS did not help. Of course, I could reinstall using legacy BIOS boot, but I wanted to solve this.
After a while of tinkering with the BIOS and readding the path of \EFI\debian\shimx64.efi to the boot menu, I found, that there is something about forcing to install to an additional path as well.
This is possible in the debian installer, though it is not done by default:
All OS installers installing things to this removable media path will conflict with any other such installers, which is bad and wrong. That’s why in Debian we don’t do this by default.
I always ignored this option and did not know, that this helps when installing on old hardware, so yeah, now I have learned that as well:
However, to help support those unfortunate people who own buggy systems like this there is an option to force grub-efi installation to the removable media path too.
Unfortunately, most systems are not designed to run something als than MS Windows. Fortunately, the open-source community and linux community can help out in this occasions :)
The solution is best described here: https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_the_removable_media_path
Of course, other Dell devices have this problem as well as mentioned here: