I woke my Dell Latitude e6530 laptop from sleep this afternoon, after having been watching movies the night before and transporting it through cold weather to the library, to find that no bootable devices were detected.

I tried reboots several times, received the same message.
I ran the onboard diagnostics which returned normal readings except for the hard drive, which it stated was not installed.

I was able to successfully load the boot menu, and chose Windows Boot Manager, as I had previously partitioned the hard disk. Windows booted successfully and I'm writing from it now.

So, there seems to be a hard drive installed after all, but the partition with Linux Mate 20 on it seems to have imploded, but the windows partition remains. Any ideas?

I will be trying more reboots and other things and will report back. Not sure what other info you might need, but as I can't load the Linux OS and the diagnostics returned little info, not sure what else I can offer.

Windows will detect the hard drive using diskpart so maybe start there.

Did the boot method like to be normal or different? I mean did you use windows to chain load linux or did you used to have grub to load either?

Boot your linux install USB and run it in live mode. Open a terminal and post the output of this.

Since you were able to boot into Windows your hard drive didn't fail. It is possible that a partition became corrupted or what is more likely you are having duel boot issues because of Grub. Since I never used Linux Mate 20 I don't know if you have a G.U.I. Boot Repair like MX Linux has, if so run Boot Repair.

Update:

After successfully booting Windows at the library, I went home and tried to boot linux again. It worked. It seemed to be a one-time problem.

However, I then encountered the same "no bootable devices" message again the next day. I then successfully booted windows again, and then re-booted to linux successfully. So no, the harddisk hasn't failed and perhaps there's a problem with grub.

jefro: I added windows to grub and can boot to either from grub. It's set to boot linux automatically.

syg00 copied output from the lsblk -f command, though i don't know if the output is moot since the boot problem seems to be intermittent.

NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sdb
├─sdb1
│ vfat DD1C-47DD 482.4M 6% /boot/efi
├─sdb2
│ ext4 9d5c304b-986d-49a6-a766-9553e9b2aa0a 45.6G 70% /run/times
├─sdb3
│
└─sdb4
ntfs 2E7215037214D187
sr0

I would strongly suggest that you boot to a live install USB device and run fsck on all the linux partitions. Your symptoms strongly suggests some partition or file system corruption that may be recoverable with a little TLC. The fact that sdb3 seems empty is not what I would expect.

I also would suggest using smartctl and running a long test on the drive, as well as looking at the output of 'smartctl -a /dev/sdb' and the error log produced for indicators of potential drive failure. These also can be run from the live usb.

The message is coming from the firmware, not grub. I would suspect the vfat EFI partition is losing its EFI flag, or maybe becoming unreadable. I have it happen occasionally on my pi3s even though the vfat partition is only ever referenced at boot.

Hey Folks, I really appreciate your help on this. I have to apologize as I don't have internet at home, so I go through a series of writing things down, then testing them at home, and then coming back to post. It's slow

So, I booted to a live linux distribution and ran fsck on the main linux partition /dev/sda2. I also tried this with -p and -y options which i read in a tutorial would try to auto-correct any errors or corruptions. All three of my attempts produced "clean" as the result, and the command had an output of 0, meaning there were no errors detected.

I have yet to try the other commands, but I'll get to it later today.

As another update, the problem seems to be getting worse. It's happening more often, and the workarounds I've been trying (like booting to windows, then back to linux; or selecting options from the boot menu) have stopped working. I'm now resigned to having my computer not work, waiting a while and trying again. Right now, it still works, so whatever error is taking place is not complete.

I experienced similar error messages trying to boot to windows for the first time yesterday. If both operating systems are suffering from similar problems, does that offer a clue as to what the problem might be?

Thanks

Maybe. The issue seems to be that after POST for some reason it can't either detect the drive or can't access it.

Run SMART or OEM diags on the drive. Could be drive, connectors, drive adapter, some chipset timing some bios issue and so forth.

I am looking up the tutorials on the various commands I've been recommended. My question is, when it comes to identifying a drive to test (for example: should I be repeating these tests for all drives? sda1 sda2 sdb, etc etc.? Does anyone think there is a particular problem drive, like the reserved drives exfat ntfs etc. (i can't remember what they're called)?

Generally a drive will map to /dev/sd[abcdefghijkl] as for example the first drive /dev/sda.
Individual partitions on sda will map to /dev/sda[1234567...], as for example the first might be /dev/sda1.

if you run a drive diagnostic test against /dev/sda then it is pointless to run it against a specific partition /dev/sda1. There are also some PARTITION diagnostics for which this might be very appropriate, but it is unclear that those would be of use to you.

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smart monitors the device (such as /dev/sda) and not the partition (such as /dev/sda2) so the command would not be correct and should be used as .

Also note that you can get an immediate report of the status without running the long test if you use . If you were to post the output of that command here a lot of us could likely offer suggestions regarding the data shown.

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They are called partitions and no you would run SMART using the drive device ID i.e
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdb

How long was the laptop out in the "cold". Depending on make/model of drive it might not work well in subfreezing temperatures and prevent the system from booting. I used a Pansonic Toughbook laptop that would not boot if it detected the drive temperature was below freezing.

Do you think you bumped the laptop into anything while it was running? Many drives have built in G sensors that try to protect the drive from a head crash. If the drive has been damaged in some manner it might be either slow in spinning up or have a damaged platter. The output of SMART should provide some clues.

Since it seems to be getting worse I would consider replacing the drive as soon as possible.

SEcond that. If you must replace hardware, eliminating moving parts is almost ALWAYS is good idea. An inexpensive SSD would provide an excellent replacement test and performance enhancement.

It's hard to say. Some days it's quite cold out, and it wouldn't surprise me if the computer was too cold to run, however, where I live we regularly run electronics in this kind of weather. Plus, it's happened to me before when it hadn't been outside at all, so I'm not thinking it's a temperature things.

Bumps on the other hand... I haven't bumped it hard, or dropped it or anything, and I don't think jostling gently in my backpack is too much for the thing to handle, as I've done that frequently with other laptops in the past and never had a problem. What may be a cause of trouble is picking it up. thumb on top, fingers underneath.. I've always got the sense my finger were pushing up on the plastic case a bit hard and squishing things like the CD drive and so forth. Occasionally I here slightly more dense buzzing from the moving parts when I do this. This would also explain why I have got freezing and shutdowns from when the computer was waking from sleep, rather that pure boot-from-shutdown problems.