Default boot device missing or boot failed.
What now?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Ask Leo.com. This one happened to me.
It was really frustrating at the time, but what I want to do is I
want to walk through not just what happened, but the process I took
to diagnose what had happened and eventually repair,
so that if you're faced with something similar, you can at least take a look
at maybe some of these same steps in your own situation.
Now I have to be clear,
default boot device missing or boot failed can happen for a lot of different reasons.
So your experience, your particular cause
if you're facing this problem will probably be somewhat different than mine.
But as I said, the steps that I went through helped me narrow down where
the problem was and then figure out exactly what it was I needed to fix.
So here's the scenario.
I was headed out to some training for a volunteer organization that I work with.
I was one of the trainers.
We normally don't necessarily need
a computer on site for this kind of training, but being who and what I am,
I always throw my laptop and other stuff in my backpack and take it along and throw
it in the car and make sure I have it with me.
And sure enough, shortly into the training we decided it would be really nice
to refer to some of the information that we have online.
So I got my laptop out,
fired it up and got this message "default boot device missing or boot failed.
Insert recovery media and hit any key,
then Select Boot Manager to choose a new boot device or to boot the recovery media."
Needless to say, that wasn't something I
was prepared to deal with right then and there.
It was, as I referred to at a pit in stomach moment.
What we ended up having to do was get the information some other way.
If I remember correctly, I used my mobile phone to get
the information online, but I closed up my laptop through it in
my backpack and decided that this was a problem for another day.
So another day, literally the next day
I tried a few things to try and understand where the problem might be.
I entered the Uefi-bios.
Unfortunately, that told me very little.
In a sense, one of the things that it told
me is that it didn't appear to see any hard drive at all.
To be clear, I say hard drive.
It's really an SSD in this laptop, which we'll actually see here in a moment.
But the point being that as far as the BIOS was concerned,
there didn't seem to be a hard drive installed on the machine.
And I can assure you there was because the day prior to this happening,
of course I had been using the machine, so I tried booting from something else.
I booted from a Windows Ten setup USB if
you will, one you can download for free from Microsoft
with the hopes of being able to run maybe the Startup repair tool or some
of the other recovery tools to perhaps further diagnose exactly what happened.
This was odd.
The Windows set up program that runs
automatically when you boot a Windows set up USB Blue screen repeatedly.
No matter what I did, that was both surprising and frustrating,
because it meant I didn't really have any additional data.
I have a theory on why that happened, and I'll talk about that in a few minutes.
The other thing that I tried then, of course, was to grab an Ubuntu disk,
a Linux disk, and see if I could boot from that.
And indeed I could.
The machine came up eventually.
It was slow, of course, but it came up.
But it too did not see that there was an internal hard disk in this machine.
And I know from experience that having run
these live Ubuntu disks just to try out Linux by booting from a USB stick,
if there's an internal hard disk, it normally sees it.
So I was able to come to a couple of tentative conclusions based on this.
One is that the problem seems to be isolated to the disk,
the actual SSD itself, and that the rest of the machine,
most notably the motherboard, seemed to be okay.
I could run it using Ubuntu.
Like I said, I could boot into something, and the machine was a working machine.
Now, there were still two possibilities.
One is the SSD had failed.
Sure, that one's kind of obvious,
but what's not quite so obvious is that it's also possible
that the interface to the SSD, which is on the motherboard, could have failed.
Unfortunately,
there's no easy way to tell, but I was able to at least get a little
bit more information by removing the SSD from my machine.
Here's a picture of the machine as it's opened.
This is, in fact,
a laptop that I purchased just last year, and one of the things I do like about it
is that it is designed specifically to be opened and repairable.
So I opened it up.
The intent here is very simple.
What I wanted to do was remove the SSD
and see if the SSD itself would work anywhere else.
Now, anywhere else might normally be maybe
another machine, since I do what I do,
and I kind of expect this to be something that I might do again,
what I did is I ordered myself an external USB enclosure for the SSD.
Now, the SSD in this case is an M.2 form factor, which means it's really just
a circuit board with an appropriate external enclosure.
I could then connect it as an external drive to any other machine
I wanted to. Got the enclosure. Inserted the drive,
and connected it up to my main PC to see if it would see anything.
It did, and it didn't. It saw that something was inserted,
but it actually could not determine that there was a drive there.
That, to me at least made it look very likely that the SSD itself had in fact
failed suddenly and catastrophically, with no hope of recovery.
So I ordered a replacement.
That's the next step.
I could be wrong, but it was the next logical step in this process.
In this case, I ordered a slightly different one.
I took the opportunity to upgrade myself.
In terms of space, the original SSD was 1 TB,
and the replacement that I ordered from, Crucial.com, is two terabytes.
I got it.
The very first thing I did, just to make sure that my process
was valid, is I put the replacement SSD into that external USB enclosure.
And in fact, when I inserted that or install that on my main machine,
sure enough, I could see there was a two terabyte SSD there.
I was able to actually format it,
give it a name, do whatever you might want to do with an external SSD.
So the good news is that my process was also proven to be relatively valid.
Using an external enclosure to determine whether or not this SSD was in fact
working or failing turns out to be a useful thing.
It's one of the reasons I wanted to keep
the external enclosure get it in the first place, actually, so that I would have this
as an opportunity, as an available diagnostic tool in the future.
So, given that the SSD that I had received now appeared to work,
I inserted it into my machine, into the laptop that originally had
the failed SSD, and I booted from the Windows Setup disk.
This time, that disk did not crash.
It did not blue screen.
My theory is that Windows Setup has a bug, and that bug is that if you attempt
to install it on a machine that has no drive, no disk drive at all, it crashes.
It's also possible that whatever the specific failure mode of that original
drive was was enough to confuse Windows Setup.
Needless to say, that shouldn't happen.
But that's my theory, that Windows Setup has a bug,
and it's not behaving properly in this particular scenario.
Nonetheless,
I was able to insert the Windows Ten, set up USB stick boot from it,
and I proceeded to reinstall Windows Ten from scratch.
Now, if you've followed me at all for any
length of time, you should be asking yourself a question right now.
And that question is this.
Where was my image backup?
Why wasn't I just restoring an image backup to this replacement hard drive?
Isn't that what image backups are for?
Indeed it is.
But I had made the conscious decision
to not worry about imaging this machine, certainly not very often
in that almost everything that's on that machine, in terms of data,
in terms of the stuff I actually work with, is replicated elsewhere,
most notably the cloud I'm running Dropbox I'm running OneDrive.
I'm running Google Drive.
I'm running all the things that cause all of the data that I work
on to be automatically placed in multiple different locations.
So all I really needed to do to get
a working machine again was to reinstall Windows Ten from scratch,
reinstall Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive and set them up.
Then all of a sudden, all my data was coming back.
Yes, it was a lengthier process, absolutely.
And I could have saved myself some time if I'd had an image backup taken immediately
prior to the failure, because then all I would have had to do
was stream or restore that image back onto the replacement hard drive,
probably adjust the partition to take advantage of the hard drives new size.
And then I would have just carried on as if nothing had happened.
But like I said, this was an intentional decision on my part.
And here you can see the ramifications of having made that kind of a decision.
I ended up saving myself some complexity,
I suppose, because when you've got a laptop, especially one that you use
in multiple locations from time to time, it can sometimes be cumbersome,
if not confusing, to occasionally have to remember, too.
Yeah, I need to install or attach
the external hard drive so that a backup would happen.
I just elected not to worry about that.
I elected not to, simply because, as I said, I know that everything that I'm
working on is saved elsewhere, and everything that I would need
to reinstall is just stuff I need to reinstall.
That's the process that I took.
You might want to take a different process, that's fine.
But understand, this is the price I paid.
I ended up taking a day or two to slowly,
carefully reinstall the software on the machine that I was actually using.
Now, in my case, that also ends up resulting in a somewhat
cleaner machine, because there's a lot of stuff that I didn't reinstall,
or that I won't reinstall because I just don't need it.
I had it installed there for some reason, to play with it, to test it.
Maybe I tried using something and stopped using it.
All that stuff isn't reinstalled.
So the net result is that my machine is
cleaner, but it did take some more time to put back together.
So the bottom line here is that I suffered zero data loss.
None whatsoever, even without the image
backup, because I'm so intentional about how I manage my data and how it gets
replicated automatically to my other machines.
It's a side effect of the fact that I can work comfortably at my primary desktop
here and or on my laptop when I'm somewhere else on the same things.
And the only way that that really works, of course, is if those same things are
automatically replicated all over the place for my situation.
So I hope that helps understand that failures happen.
This was a completely unexpected failure and it was catastrophic that SSD is dead.
There is no recovering the data from it.
It wasn't really even all that old.
Like I said, this is the machine that I got last year.
What caused the failure?
I couldn't tell you but I do know that it did fail.
It did fail without warning and that is something that you need to be aware of.
You need to prepare for.
You need to make those intentional decisions.
You may decide that you don't want to do image backups.
You may decide that you want to just back up your data or that your workflow
automatically backs up your data as it does for me.
On the other hand if you're not sure
an image backup is a great way to protect yourself from this kind of thing because
it happens to just about any other thing that might happen as well.
Anyway, I hope that was helpful for Comments for updates,
for related links and more, visit
aaskleo.com/144575. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.