Score:0

A newly plugged in SSD causes boot problems on laptop

kw flag
B W

I am writing to ask about this strange problem which occured on my laptop. It was working perfectly until I yanked a SSD from another computer (which contains an arch linux and was also working perfectly fine) and put it into the secondary SSD slot on my laptop. Then, my laptop won't boot no matter what. I see grub, I choose to enter Ubuntu and see a black screen. I enter the arch linux (which is installed on the culprit SSD), and see a non-blinking underscore. I use ubuntu live cd to boot and see another non-blinking underscore. I can see the content of both ssds in grub, so they are correctly recognized. Using safe graphics of the ubuntu livecd does not solve the problem. After some messing around I get the following error instead from the livecd:

error: cannot allocate kernel buffer.
error: you need to load the kernel first.

Removing the new SSD solves the problem immediately and everything works well again, but that is not what I want. I just do not understand why a ssd (which was working on the other laptop before I got it out) can cause so much strangeness. The SSD is a thnsn5512gpuk from Toshiba.

Organic Marble avatar
us flag
I've had similar problems if the UEFI recognizes the USB drive as a bootable drive but can't boot from it.
pl flag
Check the boot order in your BIOS. Looks like the computer is trying to boot from the disk which came from your other computer, but it doesn't have the complete boot chain installed. Try forcing boot from the Ubuntu disk either by changing boot order in the BIOS, or by manually forcing a boot device with a Function key on boot.
B W avatar
kw flag
B W
Moving around boot order does not help. None of the drives boot. Inserting a ubuntu USB and attempting to boot from Livecd does not work, i press try ubuntu and it gets stuck there.
Will avatar
id flag
Obvious thing to check - have you managed to boot into the usb live session without the suspect ssd (ie the one with arch on it) connected? I appreciate your Ubuntu os loads fine when the arch ssd is removed, but I just wonder if the usb media has a problem?
B W avatar
kw flag
B W
no, usb is fine. Also I tried removing the original ssd in the laptop (booting only with the yanked ssd), same problem. so boot failures for all my systems as well as livecd, regardless of boot order, if and only if the yanked ssd is plugged in - does not make sense!
karel avatar
sa flag
Does this answer your question? [How to repair grub?](https://askubuntu.com/questions/395045/how-to-repair-grub)
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