About 24 hours ago, Windows began locking up with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE stop code. I suspected the SSD, so I replaced an Inland Performance drive with a Samsung 9100 Pro. After reinstalling Windows and installing updates and drivers, the same failure happened again even though I had not launched a game. The system now says no bootable drive is available, although both SSDs still appear in the BIOS. The Samsung drive was installed in the same M.2 slot as the old one. The system uses an ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming WiFi motherboard with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, 32 GB of Corsair DDR5-5600 memory, a Sapphire RX 7900 XTX, and a Seasonic Focus Gold 1000W PSU. The motherboard is running the latest stable BIOS. Could the M.2 slot or motherboard storage controller be failing, and what should I test before buying more hardware?
3 Answers
A bad motherboard M.2 slot or an issue with the board’s PCIe storage connection could cause this, especially if the drives remain visible in BIOS but stop being bootable. Try the second M.2 slot, reinstall Windows there if necessary, and use the system for a while with BIOS defaults. If both drives work reliably in another slot but fail in the original one, you have a much stronger case for an RMA or motherboard replacement rather than another SSD.
Since two different SSDs show the same behavior, the SSD itself is no longer the leading suspect. Check whether the BIOS consistently detects the drive after a reboot and whether the installer sees it as a normal boot target. Also test with EXPO and any CPU overclocking disabled, because memory or platform instability can corrupt Windows and produce misleading boot-device errors. Running a memory test would be worthwhile too.
The motherboard is a possibility, but I would troubleshoot the slot and configuration before replacing it. Power the system down, reseat the M.2 drive, clear CMOS, load BIOS defaults, and confirm that the storage controller is using the expected UEFI/AHCI settings. Then test the Samsung drive in another M.2 slot and see whether the Windows installer can detect and boot from it. If the problem follows the slot rather than the drive, that points much more strongly to the motherboard or its storage path.
The new Samsung drive was installed in the same M.2 slot as the Inland drive. I’ll try another slot and reset the BIOS before buying anything else.