Lessons from Resurrecting a Linux Laptop

Breaking systems down to their smallest parts to find the crux of a problem

The solution might be as simple as a gentle push, or a tightened screw, visible only when you take the time to look properly.

It started with a frozen GNOME home screen, and a manually reboot straight into the dark abyss.

This kind of moment may make your stomach drop slightly—a visceral response to your brain jumping to the fatalistic conclusion that all is lost, your machine has crashed and burnt out.

My Framework 12 laptop, running Fedora 41, had decided that today was the day it would refuse to boot.

Screenshots are hard without Flameshot

The clues were written right there for me to track down leads.

But down which decision tree would I go first to uproot the problem? And how long would it take till I worked my way back up to arrive at the most simple, most broad perspective to realize under which turned leaf hid the solution?

This article is largely written for tech nerds to comment on my noob skills. Admittedly, it is not a very interesting or urgent article IMO, and doesn’t add much to the world of fixing computers that isn’t already known. The technical knowledge though may one day help someone in a similar situation.

But more broadly…

I present the lessons immediately below as a summary that may provide some insights for novice problem solvers in any professional field.

The Broader Lesson: Methodical Debugging

This experience reinforces several important principles for technical troubleshooting, either in code, managing teams, leading organizations, or simply getting your Amazon Firestick to stream Netflix¹:

1. Avoid Hasty Assumptions: My first inspection missed the actual problem. Only by questioning my initial assessment and looking again more carefully did I find the issue.

2. Use Appropriate Tools: An actual and metaphoric headlamp (the AHA machine) made all the difference in identifying the misaligned SSD at the core of the problem. Proper lighting, appropriate diagnostic software, and the right physical tools are essential.

3. Understand the System: Knowing how the boot process works, what commands would reveal hardware status, and how the Framework's modularity could be leveraged were all crucial.

4. Break problems down to their smallest parts, and symmetrically analyze the system down to its foundational building blocks. Align and compare problems to the structural design of the complex system which you are trying to get running again. Identify a gap where something may have gone awry, and build it back up better.

5. Take Your Time: Rushing through diagnostics is a recipe for missed details and incomplete fixes. A missed detail can send you down a deep rabbit hole, getting colder and colder from the answer and getting further away from the core problem. Each step deserves deliberate, acute attention.

6. Question Intuitions: My initial thought was that the SSD had failed completely. Had I not questioned this and explored physical connections, I might have unnecessarily replaced the drive, or continued to read online forums all day.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but did you try unplugging and plugging it back in?

To summarize a general lesson from today for coding and for life’s problems as well:

• Slow down and go through methodical steps every time you try to fix something.

• Don't attempt a short cut simply because of a sense of urgency.

• Use a retractable system so you can find its flaws and improve the system to make next time less painful.

• Second guess knee-jerk reactions at first. Come back to gut instincts after all other logical paths can be determined to be fruitless. In this way, you’ll learn more auxiliary information. And eventually your response to problems will be guided as much as—if not more—by hands-on experience and broad knowledge as by intuition.

Read on if you are indeed a bit nerdy and want to know more about new laptops, SSD and boot loading.

Setting the Stage

Let's back up. I had been away for five days in New York. The laptop had been sitting on my desk, untouched. It hadn't been dropped, exposed to the elements, or subjected to any of the typical physical traumas that might explain such a failure. I only discovered the issue when I tried to SSH into it remotely.

Why remote? Well, I do have a MacBook Pro. However, she’s got a dysfunctional monitor, and a completely incapacitated ‘touch bar’ (do they even make them with that stupid thing any longer). Moreover, I really like the keyboard settings and extensions of MacOS and the UI way more than using GNOME on Linux (like the difference between crtl + v vs. cmd + v can make or break my coding experience). So I just ssh into my Framework when I am really developing, which has 64GB RAM and an Intel i7 processor, not to mention a 1T SSD. That baby purrs when running heavy I/O requests. My Mac is just a glorified hotrod that takes me to my rocket ship.

For the uninitiated, Framework laptops are designed with repairability and modularity in mind. Its a psudo-DIY machine, like a RaspberryPi on steroids. Unlike the glued-together, soldered-down monsters that most manufacturers sell, Framework makes laptops that you can actually fix. Components can be swapped out, upgraded, or replaced with relative ease. It's a great engineering philosophy that makes sense in a world drowning in e-waste, and if you support a vision like that, check them out here.

That modular design would prove crucial to this story.

The First Signs of Trouble

Upon encountering the "no bootloader found" screen, I did what any technically-inclined person would do—I pressed F2 to enter the system's firmware configuration interface. If you're more familiar with older systems, this would be analogous to entering the BIOS, though modern systems use UEFI firmware instead.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the contemporary successor to the traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) that has managed the fundamental operations of computers since the IBM PC days. Fedora, like most modern Linux distributions, uses UEFI in conjunction with the GRUB bootloader to initialize the system.²

What I saw—or rather, what I didn't see—in the firmware interface was telling: no storage devices listed. None. The SSD that should have been there, containing my operating system, my files, my digital life, was nowhere to be found.

This was... concerning.

The Methodical Approach to Troubleshooting

There's a particular mindset required when approaching hardware issues. You need to be both methodical and creative, systematic yet intuitive. Most importantly, you need to resist the urge to panic or make hasty assumptions.

Here's where I'd like to emphasize something crucial: slow down. I cannot stress this enough. When troubleshooting, especially with hardware, rushing leads to mistakes, overlooked details, and potentially making things worse.

My first step was to create a Fedora 41 live USB drive—essentially a bootable operating system that runs from the USB stick rather than the computer's internal storage. This would allow me to examine the system state without relying on the apparently missing SSD. Recovering your machine from a bootable USB is a common practice, as expressed here, done easily by spamming F12 when the machine is coming online to enter the boot selection screen.

So after booting from the USB, I ran lsblk—a command that lists all block devices (storage) connected to the system. The results were stark: only the 128GB USB drive appeared. My SSD was as invisible to the operating system as it had been to the firmware interface.

I attempted to connect to Wi-Fi using NetworkManager's command-line interface (nmcli), and observed something interesting: the device was attempting to connect but never completing the handshake. This suggested that the problem might extend beyond just the SSD.

With so many problems, it can feel overwhelming. Where do I even begin? I needed to focus on the crux of the problem, and not all the downhill consequences.

The Physical Inspection

Not my nails, I’ve actually never had a manicure IRL.

At this point, it was time to open the laptop. One of the beautiful things about Framework laptops is how accessible their internals are—a few screws and you're in, without needing to pry apart glued seams or worry about breaking plastic clips.

My initial inspection was casual, perhaps too casual. I noticed the SSD's retention screw seemed slightly loose, so I tightened it. The drive itself appeared properly seated. I closed everything up, but upon rebooting, nothing had changed.

This is where patience and thoroughness prove their worth.

Rather than assuming I'd correctly assessed the situation, I decided to look again—this time with better lighting. I opened the laptop again, but now wearing a headlamp to provide direct illumination on the components.

And there it was—the detail I had missed. Under proper lighting, the SSD looked slightly out of position. Not dramatically so, but enough that my quasi-trained eye could now detect the misalignment. To be fair, I rarely mess with hardware; I’ve replaced a fan or two, a WiFi card, but I’ve never really soldered my own motherboard.

I applied gentle pressure, and felt that satisfying 'click' as the drive seated fully into its M.2 slot. This was followed by properly securing the retention screw. This time, there was a tangible difference in how secure the connection felt.

The Mystery

The question lingered: how had the SSD become unseated in the first place? The laptop hadn't moved. It hadn't been bumped or jostled. It had simply been sitting on my desk while I was away.

This mystery points to something that experienced hardware technicians, unlike myself, have come to understand: electronic components can shift over time due to thermal expansion and contraction.³ As components heat up during use and cool down when idle, the slight dimensional changes can, over many cycles, cause connectors to work themselves loose.

It's also possible that the SSD retention screw had never been properly tightened during my initial assembly, and the drive had been slowly working its way out of the slot over time, finally reaching the point of disconnection while I was away.

The Technical Details: Why SSDs Fail This Way

The biggest clue in my information gathering came from this subreddit.

NVME drives are like this, when they fail, THEY FAIL HARD.

So if it had failed hard, why wouldn’t I see more signs to say that my SSD was done-for?

Breaking the problem down into smaller parts:

Going back to the basics of the the problem, I had to consider how an NVMe SSD actually connects to the Framework 12.

It connects to the system via the PCIe bus (the same interface used by graphics cards and other high-speed components). Unlike older SATA connections, which use cables and have some physical tolerance for partial connections, PCIe connections are much more binary in their functioning—they either work completely or not at all.

When an NVMe drive isn't properly seated, the high-speed differential pairs that make up the PCIe connection cannot maintain signal integrity. There's no "kinda connected" state—it's all or nothing.

Seeing the glaring repetition of a concept helped to explain the total disappearance of the drive from the system's perspective. It wasn't detected by the firmware, so the UEFI couldn't find a bootable device. It wasn't detected by the operating system, so lsblk couldn't show it.

I made the hypothesis that at the very root level crux, this problem was caused by a bad PCIe connection.

And following that idea was all it took to resolve this problem.

The solution here was as simple as a gentle push, and tightening a screw. It only become visible when I took the time to look properly.

GRUB, UEFI, and Boot Processes

To understand why a disconnected SSD results in the specific error message I encountered, it helps to know how modern systems boot:

1. When you press the power button, the system's firmware (UEFI) initializes the hardware components.

2. The firmware looks for bootable devices according to the boot priority order in its settings.

3. Once it finds a bootable device, it loads the boot loader from that device.

4. For Fedora and many Linux distributions, this boot loader is GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader).

5. GRUB then loads the Linux kernel and initial RAM disk, which in turn bring up the full operating system.

If the SSD is disconnected, the firmware can't find a bootable device, resulting in the "no bootloader found" error. This differs from BIOS-based systems, which might show "No operating system found" or similar messages.⁴

Ultimate Thoughts: The Myth of the Lone Genius

This brings me to a broader point about technology and innovation: We often glorify the image of the lone genius in a garage, creating world-changing technology through sheer individual brilliance. The reality is far different.

Even when working alone, as I was when fixing my laptop, I was drawing on collective knowledge—forum posts, documentation, and the experiences of countless others who had encountered similar issues. The Framework community, the Linux community, and the broader technical community all contributed to my ability to solve this problem.

Real innovation and problem-solving rarely happen in isolation. The most significant technological advancements come from teams—engineers, designers, product managers, marketers, and users all contributing their perspectives and expertise.

So the next time you're faced with a technical challenge, remember: slow down, be methodical, use the collective wisdom available to you, and don't be afraid to question your assumptions.

The solution might be as simple as a gentle push and a tightened screw, visible only when you take the time to look properly.

1. I am NOT paid by any of these dudes. Use of these company names and products are purely used as an example of a situation we have all been in. Like getting a McFrosty from McDonald, and the machine is down again. Or the Community Coffee machine at the JCC in Uptown New Orleans is not working again because Karen and her six feral offspring all wanted doubled hot chocolates after the pool.

2. When I worked in DevOps, we had long ago abstracted scripts that handled these things, and inadvertently I didn’t really have to deal with this. Yes, to call myself a DevOps engineer and get away without having to use fuse daily is quite a luxury.

3. Further reading on the topic of thermal expansion, visit:

• https://www.chemtronics.com/how-to-identify-and-solve-thermal-stress-issues-in-solder-joints

• https://www.ansys.com/blog/thermal-cycling-failure-in-electronics

Disk Partitioning and Its Importance

4. While not directly related to my specific issue, understanding disk partitioning is valuable context for Linux troubleshooting. A partition is a logical division of a physical storage device, and a typical Linux installation includes several:

• /boot/efi: A small FAT32 partition (typically 100-500MB) that contains the EFI boot loader files.

• /boot: Contains the Linux kernel and initial RAM disk.

• /: The root partition containing the operating system files.

• /home: User files and settings (sometimes on the same partition as root).

• swap: A partition used for virtual memory operations.

When installing or recovering Linux, understanding these partitions and their purposes is crucial. For recovery operations from a live USB, you often need to mount these partitions in the correct locations to access and repair the system.