Hello all. This is the first time I’ve had issues installing Manjaro, but it’s also the first time I’ve tried installing it on a laptop. Long story short, decided to switch my Window laptop over to Manjaro. I created the bootable USB, and started the installer through the live-boot environment.
Things were going well until I got a “Failed to create partition error” during the installation. A bit odd, but I thought perhaps one of the BIOS settings could be messing with the installation (I know laptops sometimes do weird things with sleep/hybrid modes) so I restarted and checked the BIOS and to my surprise my SSD was not detected anymore. Needles to say inxi doesn’t detect it.
It seems very strange to me however that a failed partition during install would make my BIOS no longer recognize the SSD. I could open up the laptop and check that no cables got loose, but 1) that would be an incredible coincidence, and 2) it’s one of those modern laptops where I can’t seem to remove the battery and I was taught not to mess with internals of a laptop while the battery is still plugged in.
can you boot from a live usb and then check from there if the SSD and the contents of the harddisk are still accessible?
if so you still got your data, you can use disks and gparted to fix the master boot record I think.
The SSD is definitely not accessible. Neither inxi nor gparted lists it as a device. And yeah, pretty sure I messed up my MBR. But even without a MBR surely the SSD would still be detected in BIOS, right? Don’t worry about the contents of the SSD, I performed a backup of it before doing the install.
@Lemur1 is this an older laptop? Because this sounds an awful lot like your ssd might just have died. Possibly nothing even to do with installation of Manjaro, but just coincidence.
Somewhere around 4-5 years old. I’m leaning towards SSD failure too, but it seems like an extreme coincidence. I can’t open it up and check since it uses weird screws; or at least none of my screwdriver heads work. I understand that the SSD would be more likely to fail under load, like during distro install, but 5 years is very early for an SSD to fail. Even more so considering that laptop was not under heavy use.
No, you did not “brick” your system. There is no such thing. Please edit your topic title to reflect what you actually need help with and provide more information to help us help you. If you do not, this post will be closed and unlisted in 48 hours.
I’ve edited the title. I’m not sure what more information I could possibly provide. Also, I heavily disagree that there is no such thing as “bricking” a system. No idea where you got the idea it’s not a thing.
Thank you for editing the title, that’s much better.
We used to actually ban the word brick from being used on the forum because it’s meaningless. One can always recover the system. However, flashing the wrong bootloader or modem on an Android phone could actually brick it without hope of recovery. This is not the case for PC’s.