Hi!

I'm running Debian 9 on a ssd. I have no other disks connected to the computer, only this 1 ssd. Ever since I installed Debian 9, I have been having this weird problem, for which I would like to find a cause and possibly a fix. The problem is that every now and then (almost daily, sometimes many times in a day) my computer just freezes and the ssd/hdd usage light is on. Like, not even flashing, it's just steadily on. I have sometimes seen this with traditional hdd's under a heavy load, but never before with an ssd. Usually SSD's are so fast that the light just quickly flashes.

So, the ssd/hdd light is steadily on, and the computer is frozen. I can usually still move the cursor, but the computer doesn't react to any clicks or keyboard keys being pressed. So the only option that I have in this situation is to press down the power button to turn the computer off.

What is even weirder is that usually after this problem has occurred and I try to boot the computer again, the bios doesn't seem to recognize the ssd. I get a bios message saying something along the lines of "The bios doesn't fully support the boot device", and the bios refuses to boot the system. In this situation, when I go to look at the bios settings to try to manually tell the bios to boot from the ssd, I discover that the bios doesn't even show the ssd anywhere, not even in the deepest depths of the advanced bios settings. It's like the ssd would have completely vanished. In this situation the only solution that seems to get the ssd visible again is to turn off the computer and switch the sata cable on a different slot on the motherboard. After that the computer usually boots up normally again.

But then, when I have used the computer for a while again, sooner or later the same freezing problem occurs, and I have to switch the sata cable back to the original slot just to get the system to boot up again.

Any ideas on what might be causing this? Are there any log files that I could check to see what is actually happening when this problem occurs?

I should also say that I'm not a 100% sure that this problem is caused by the ssd. Usually the freezing occurs when I'm doing something GPU heavy on the computer, like playing 3D games or watching HD video. Even if I'm streaming the video from an internet service, which shouldn't be using the SSD much at all. This has led me to suspect that the problem might be also caused by the GPU or its drivers. I have an AMD graphics card.

I can post additional information about my setup if necessary.

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated!

This could be any number of issues including: defective RAM; defective SATA controller circuitry on the motherboard; defective motherboard chipset; or incompatibilities between the SSD and motherboard.

My first recommendation would be to seek out and expose defective hardware. You might want to create a live CD with mprime on it and use that to test your hardware. Mprime is a prime number testing program that people long ago realized was very good at testing computer hardware for defects.

Thank you for your answer. And sorry that it took me this long to reply. I will try to do some testing as you suggested, and then post about the results here.

I would suggest you have a look at the smartctl information for your SSD. Here is a link you can read a little bit about smartctl; or the command 'man smartctl' will show you the man page.

The link -->https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/li...r-hard-drives/

This will give you some idea if the drive itself is at fault.

Hello Marmelaad,

Have you discovered what is causing your problems?

From my experience I would look at the SSD itself, as the most likely suspect. Sometimes the Sata cable goes bad, I have seen that happen. But I'm suspecting it is the SSD.

As previous posters have mentioned, check the SSD with a live CD test. You basically want to look for any serious smart errors.

I won't go into details right now, but you can download and install smartmontools on many Linux distros, including Debian.


Or download the ISO file from the smartmontools.org website and burn it to disk.

Personally I happen to like Parted Magic, because it includes the smartmontools, and much more. And I also like UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) for hardware diagnostics. UBCD is free, while Parted Magic is not. Sometimes I will boot from a standard linux live CD/DVD, such as antiX or Xubuntu, to test hardware as needed.


One other issue, could you be running out of RAM memory? When your RAM is full, the computer starts swapping things to disk, which can make the computer seem to freeze. Hard drives, even SSDs, are much slower then RAM memory.

Howard