I'm troubleshooting a Lenovo Legion 5 (2021, Intel i5 and RTX 2060) with two M.2 drives. It began with repeated DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION blue screens. After using Recovery Environment and chkdsk, the Windows installation became unbootable and now reports INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. The Windows drive's data is still readable.
The second M.2 drive is even stranger: BIOS and a Linux live USB detect it normally, but Windows cannot see it in File Explorer, Disk Management, or the Windows installer. The second drive stopped appearing shortly before the boot-device error began. Switching or reinstalling storage drivers did not help, and I'm wondering whether Intel RST/VMD, the storage controller, or corrupted Windows drivers could connect both problems—or whether one of the drives is failing.
I'm trying to preserve the data rather than wipe or reinstall immediately. What should I check first, and is there a safe way to diagnose this?
2 Answers
The most useful next step is to recover the BSOD dump files. If you can start Windows or Safe Mode, check C:WindowsMinidump and copy any files somewhere safe. Those dumps may identify whether the crashes involve a storage driver, controller, or hardware fault. If Windows will not boot, you may need to retrieve them from the drive using another operating system or recovery environment.
Since Linux and the firmware can see the second drive, while Windows cannot, this could be a Windows storage-driver or Intel RST/VMD configuration problem rather than a completely dead SSD. However, the timing of the drive disappearing and the boot-device failures also makes an intermittent SSD or controller issue possible. Avoid chkdsk or other repair operations until the important files are backed up, and copy the data from Linux while the drive is accessible.
The second disk started working again while I was troubleshooting, so I’m copying as much data from it as possible in case it fails again. I’ll gather the crash dumps afterward.