a couple weeks ago, firefox starts randomly crashing about once a day. weird. i'm not doing anything different, no major changes, bit concerning.
yesterday, it crashes while i'm using photoshop. eh, okay. then photoshop crashes. hm
restart photoshop, start editing my picture. three minutes later, it crashes. hm
reboot. start photoshop. 30 seconds in, it crashes. uh oh
run memtest. clean for the first 30 minutes; yeah, it's not the RAM. well, I just so happened to have ordered a new SSD to replace my primary OS drive, because another SSD in my machine has been throwing disk errors for a bit, so let's just do this: put the new SSD in, replace the old failing one with the old boot drive, install a new OS, we'll do data migration later
oops. windows install won't boot, sits at the throbber forever. reboot into windows, sits at the throbber forever. start removing parts, reset the BIOS, remove all the drives; nothing. sits at the throbber forever.
finally, try booting with a linux usb drive. sits at the throbber forever. ah, but wait - we press escape, and there's billions of ATA errors
Turns out,
the failing drive was not nvme like i thought; it was an ancient SATA SSD which had apparently gone so far south that it was fuzzing the SATA interface. anything I tried to boot just got locked in a permanent loop of failed write commands. why was linux trying to write something to the drive in the very first stages of boot? your guess is as good as mine.
i removed the drive and the machine works perfectly now, no crashes. moved the drive to a USB adapter on a linux machine; if i mount it RW, it hangs the machine. if i mount it RO, it reads, but I can only pull off about 10GB of the 2TB; after that, any read attempt just crashes the storage driver or something. wow! bad!
