Backup process appears to have bricked M.2 drive
I've had Acronis on my machine since around January of this year, and have been successfully backing up my hard drive to the cloud every week since I initially installed it. Things appeared to be going fine until about 3 weeks ago. I woke up after the weekly backup had run to see my computer at a black screen that simply said 'No boot media found'. I thought that was odd, so I restarted my computer and it was able to come back up. I didn't think much of it, but then later in the day after trying to run another backup I received a blue screen and yet again it said 'No boot media found' when trying to load Windows again.
At this point, the drive itself was no longer visible in BIOS and not recognized by the machine at all. Normally, I'd chalk this up to the M.2 drive or the slot in the motherboard failing ... but the story gets more interesting from here.
So, I had a spare M.2 drive and popped that into the machine. Ran a FULL RESTORE of the drive off the cloud backup (dam thing took about 50hrs to complete) and was back up and running. Or so I thought.
About a day or two later, I ran another backup process on the restored data and after it got to about 87% complete, received yet another Blue Screen of Death error message and yet again the drive was no longer found in BIOS.
Was able to run a restore, one time, on the boot sector of the drive. Had the machine up for about 2hours or so before the same thing happened (again, during a backup attempt). Blue screen and now the drive is not visible at all in BIOS or by the machine ... the second drive to fail in the same way.
Doe anyone have ANY idea why the backup process would have destroyed the drive itself ... to the point that the BIOS doesn't even recognize it at all? Not only to one drive, but to two drives in the span of a few days. By the way, my motherboard has three M.2 slots on it, so I've tried to move it around to other slots to see if it was a motherboard issue or not.
I'm currently on a 3rd M.2 drive that I purchased .. but am afraid to even install Acronis again at this point on the new drive, or even try and restore any data, as I don't want yet another bricked drive.


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Steve, After taking one of the drives out of the computer and placing it into a secondary machine it did show up inside of Computer Management. However, it was listed as not being initialized and when attempting to initialize it that process failed with a windows error message along the lines of 'invalid argument or parameter'.
The machine itself is a higher-end machine purchased about 10months ago (AMD 5090 ; 16gb 4000MHz memory ; Nvidia 3090) however no overclocking was done on any of the components.
Which drive, or portion of the drive, does the VSS snapshots write to when they are created for the backup? If it is making a copy of the Windows boot sector and recovery partitions, where are those placed prior to upload to the Acronis Cloud? I agree that the backup process, by nature, should be a read-only process however something in that process of reading or writing data to the M.2 drive has caused it to no longer be readable/accessible in any fashion on not one but two different drives.
The only thing I can go off of at the moment is that the new (2nd) drive, after recovery, had worked for several hours straight up until the point I began running another Acronis backup. Within minutes of that backup starting (and reaching roughly 86% completion) the machine blue-screened and the boot drive was no longer visible in BIOS.
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Michael,
Your description of your issue suggests that your bios boot order has become corrupted. Your post says
I woke up after the weekly backup had run to see my computer at a black screen that simply said 'No boot media found'.
It sounds like your backup task runs at night which is fine but the question is do you have the PC shutdown after the backup task runs? If yes then you got the black screen when you started the PC in the morning? Could there have been a Windows update pending a restart during this period of time?
I suspect that you have other disks attached to the PC. In that case I recommend that you disconnect all but the Windows disk then restart the machine and enter the bios setup. In setup look for Advanced then Boot. In Boot check to see what is selected as First in Boot Order. What you should see there is Windows Boot Manager. If you do not select that entry to expand it and look for Windows Boot Manager and if it is there select it as First Boot. If Windows boot Manager is already First or you complete making it first then Save your changes and Exit the setup and allow the PC to restart. This should get things working for you as long as your disk is not actually bricked.
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Enchantech wrote:
Your description of your issue suggests that your bios boot order has become corrupted.
I'm familiar with the BIOS boot order and how to alter it within the advanced boot menu(s). My issue is not that the order of the drives is incorrect. The problem is that the drive itself does not appear in the boot list at all, and is not recognized by the BIOS as even being attached/installed in the machine. While the drive is plugged in / connected / screwed in / etc. the machine acts as it there is nothing attached in that slot.
I have also tried moving the drive to other locations on the motherboard (which has three different M.2 slots) as well as pulling the battery out to clear the CMOS. Nothing I've tried has been able to get the BIOS or the boot menu to see or list the drive as being connected.
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This is very odd; the only thing I can think of, if you have not already done so, is to re-flash the BIOS (possibly with the latest version).
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Michael,
What make and model of motherboard are you using here?
I do not wish to alarm you but I have just experienced a like condition with one of my older machines, a Z270 board and it turns out that the PCH controller on the board has failed. I spent a couple of full days troubleshooting the issue to find the problem.
In your bios you might have an Advanced tab which could have a Storage Configuration option. Looking there it present can you tell me what SATA Mode is selected? Under this Advanced tab, if it exists, do you see an option for NVMe Configuration? I have these options and they are common among enthusiast boards. In my case and how I figured out my PCH controller was toast is that most boards using NVMe drives must have the SATA Mode set to RAID or Intel RST Premium Raid controller to enable the M.2 compatibility for the chipset. In my case when set to RAID mode the NVMe drive and M.2 Configuration options would disappear resulting in a non boot condition even though Windows Boot Manager did show as the 1st boot device in the boot order.
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While I would normally agree with advice in the previous post about using RAID mode, you need to be careful as some AMD Chipsets, such as the X570, will not recognise the SATA drives if set to RAID mode (if RAID has not be configured). I had this problem yesterday when rebuilding a PC with new motherboard and CPU; I just changed it back on my Gigabyte X570 UD and the SATA drives were recognised. It may be possible to get them back using the RAID utility but I could not be bothered.
Ian
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