Yesterday: a normal laptop. Today: ‘no bootable device’, a BIOS listing every port but yours, a drive that’s simply absent. Undetected SSDs are their own service category because the causes range from a loose connector to a controller that died overnight — and because every DIY hour spent ‘trying things’ is usually wasted on the wrong cause.
$ edr connecting…
Before assuming the worst: reseat once (an M.2 blade or SATA cable that’s walked loose is a real thing, especially after transport or a knock), try one other port or machine once, and glance in BIOS rather than Windows — a drive visible to BIOS but not Windows is a software problem with far gentler answers. That’s the whole approved list. What’s off-list: firmware updates on a misbehaving drive, ‘low-level repair’ utilities, and marathon retry sessions — if a drive is undetected for hardware reasons, retries add nothing, and if it’s wavering in and out, the window for a clean image is closing while you toggle.
In rough order of arrival: firmware panic-locks — the SSD hits internal corruption and hides rather than risk your data, sometimes presenting as zero-capacity or a wrong name (these respond to service-mode access, and the data typically returns complete); controller death, where the drive’s brain is gone and recovery reads the NAND directly; power-side failures on the drive’s own board; and connector damage on drives that travel. The free diagnostic identifies which within a day or two of arrival — considerably cheaper than guessing, in both money and data.
Comparatively good: the hardware is answering, so the tangle is in partitions, file systems or drivers — the recoverable end of this spectrum. Don't initialize or format when prompted; that's Windows offering to pave over the data it can't read. Diagnostic will read what Windows can't.
No — intermittent detection means something is failing, and each appearance may be among the last. If it's currently visible, copy the irreplaceable immediately, most-precious first. If it's gone again, stop cycling power and bring it in while a clean image is still likely.
Manufacturer firmware updates can — which is why they're on the don't list for a drive holding un-backed-up data. Bench-level firmware recovery is different: service-mode access that repairs the drive's internal state specifically to read your data out, not to refurbish the drive.