Yesterday it was a normal laptop. Now you get “No Bootable Device” with a BIOS list that shows every port except for the one that you need to see, and a drive that has just disappeared. Because there can be such a wide variety of reasons why an SSD goes unrecognised (from a loose connection to a dead controller overnight) and because each hour you spend trying different options is typically spent doing something that isn’t going to work anyway, undetected SSDs constitute their own separate category of service.
Before jumping to conclusions, check the connection once (loose M.2 blades or SATA cables are more common than most people realise, especially when moving drives or after a knock), test the same drive in a different slot/port or system once, and also look at your BIOS instead of Windows. If the drive shows up in BIOS but not Windows, there is probably an issue related to software that will have easier answers. That’s all there is to it. Firmware updates on a non-functioning drive, low-level repair programs and marathon attempt sessions are all examples of things you should not do: if a drive is undetected for hardware reasons, retries add nothing, and if it keeps dropping in and out, the window for a clean image is closing while you keep trying.
Beginning with the most common, roughly by frequency: firmware panic locks, when the SSD encounters internal corruption and chooses to protect your data by hiding itself. This may show up as zero capacity or an incorrect name. These drives will typically recover from service mode with the data complete. Controller failure, when the SSD’s brain is dead and we need to read the NAND directly. Power-side failure, when the SSD’s circuit board fails. Connector failure on drives that are portable. The free diagnostic identifies which one within a day or two of arrival, which is considerably cheaper than guessing, in both money and data.
Relatively better news than dead hardware: you’ve got some sort of partition, file system or driver issue, which should be recoverable. When you’re asked whether you want to initialise or format, don’t. That’s just Windows telling you that it has no way of reading your files, and offering to wipe them. Our diagnostic will try to read files that Windows cannot.
No. Intermittent errors are an indication that one of these things is going to fail completely at some point, and this may be the last time it works. If it’s visible right now, copy all the important stuff off straight away, most precious first. As soon as it’s gone again, quit trying to cycle the power on it and get it to us before a clean image of your drive is lost forever.
Manufacturers’ firmware updates can wipe a drive, which is exactly why they are always on a “do not touch” list for drives containing data you have not yet copied (backed up). Firmware recovery at the bench level is a process of accessing the service mode in order to repair the drive’s internal state so as to allow it to read back your original data, not to restore your drive to working condition.