Laptop on battery power will not read from M.2 SSD
 

Guys
I have installed many flavours of Linux over the years on many chassis - but this response from a laptop retailer has me scratching my head.

I purchased a laptop recently with a 256 M.2 SSD and proceeded to install Linux. Everything was working great until I removed the power cable to run the laptop off battery. Well the OS stopped reading anything from the SSD...if that part of the OS was already loaded into RAM no problem, but if I loaded another piece of software (and the OS would have have to go to the SSD to get it) the OS started to throw error messages about "cannot access xxxxx".

So I throw the laptop back to the retailer and tell them exactly what the issue is and how to re-create it. Here is their response ...

"Thank you for getting in touch. I have spoken with the technician and he is currently still testing the system. So far he has tested the laptop woth a new M.2 SSD with Windows installed and it booted and everything was working fine, so then he installed the Linux software onto the new M.2 and the problem re-occured. After which he tried the old and new M.2's with Linux on in a completely different laptop chassis and the problems occured. He is currently still testing however at this time we believe the issue is caused by the Linux software as this is generally not supported by these chassis' eventhough we do have customer that have sucess installing it."

Yep, they blame the fault on Linux.

Anyone want to comment on this, please feel free to vent.

Simon.

ahh my m.2 sdd has the OSes installed onto it, windows and four different Linux Distros, and it works just fine on my laptop using AC/DC.

It reads as /dev/sdb and my hdd (sdd) reads as /dev/sda . a little backwards but it is not of any consequence. HP 840 g2

what is the make and model of that laptop you're putting to question. You forgot to make mention of it.

BW-userx

The retailer is PC Specialist here in the UK. the model I purchased was a 17.3" Cosmos VII - do not know what motherboard they use.

So I guess you don't think the problem is the Linux OS either?

Which bus is the dive attached to? Is it the drive which Windows was on initially?
All I can think of is that Linux doesn't deal well with power states for some onboard chips (no help from manufacturer) so, perhaps, a bus is being put to sleep?
Have you [or the "experts"?]tried lsusb and lspci (as root) before and after removing the mains lead?

quote from a user of one of them, on youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJx4vZj9Wfc

maybe its just them trying to make a quick note, pound, buck, eruo, ( pick one) and not knowing exactly what they are doing.

the only other one is

It is not uncommon for any system to fail on Linux. For the most part only windows is tested at factory. I used to work at a big name place and you'd be amazed how much trouble we would have on software changes. Some device or some timing or some driver issue can wreck the billion of possibilities there. Laptops have never been a strong point for linux.
Unless I read the test wrong of they did it wrong it does lead us to suspect that the OS you selected may be at fault. Simple solution is to get a bunch of distro's and try it. Should or may fail on booting to distro on battery to view drives.

In this case the laptop is a very specialized device although most folks don't consider it. I'd assume that some power management or current draw is causing this. Look into that maybe for clues how to fix it or write new code for power or slot usage.

Is this a uefi booted system?

Guess it could be some issue related to the age of the battery. Use new tested battery.

I'd be looking at the battery/power supply area. No problems on mains?

Sad fact is, linux uses more power than windows, especially before things are loaded like acpi. There is also a historical 'power good' signal which may be glitching as poor batteries respond to current spikes poorly.If It was mine, I'd have tried a smoothing capacitor on the battery but fitting that is not trivial, and impossible for me since my stroke. If the 'power good' goes down, your data is possibly corrupt and you want things to sit down. If you have a friend who will solder in capacitors, use 1000uF - 2200uF.