Weird inaccessible storage issue with Intel NUC and Server 2016 / WinPE

R

Robert Gijsen

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right forum. I'm having a strange issue with an Intel NUC from time to time. It's a 4th gen Intel NUC d54250wykh, with 16GB of RAM and a 120GB Samsung 840 Pro, regular 2.5'' SATA. In that I've installed Server 2016 (with GUI). I know that is (or was at least) not officially a supported OS for that NUC. Still though, it works perfectly fine, and as server 2016 is basically just Windows 10 there aren't any obvious driver issues either. All drivers are the default Windows Media drivers, they are installed automatically by Windows. For now it acts as a Veeam proxy on a remote location, connected to an iSCSI block storage NAS until I get some proper euquipment for that. Functionally it's perfect for the job and green on energy use.

The issue is the same as I've read in numerous Windows 10 posts. Every time the dreadful cumulative updates come along (we use WSUS for what it matters) it's just a gamble whether or not it will come up after the reboot. About 4 - 5 times now I've ran into an 'inaccessible bootdevice' issue. I'm using the plain standard Microsoft AHCI storage driver.

However, after a few reboots with the inaccessible bootdevice, it tries to boot recovery, in which it succeeds. However, my Samsung SSD is not visible. Diskpart --> list disks shows no devices at all - even if it just booted recovery from it!

Even stranger is that when I boot regular WinPE from PXE or USB, still no disks are found. I'd figure the disk or controller is somehow corrupt, yet it boots recovery fine from it.
So what I do so far to fix it is take the SSD out, and using a SATA --> USB cradle I restore an image I took from the machine to it. Put it back in the NUC and presto! It works fine again,and so far 4 out of 5 times after it installed the updates again it worked fine. So it's a bit of a hit-and-miss when it comes to updating. Also, when booting either recovery or WinPE (both are WinPE in essence) the SSD shows up fine.

The BIOS/EFI of the NUC is up to date as of yet, firwmare of the SSD is up to date as of yet, I've reset the EFI settings to default, all to no avail. The smart status of the SSD is 100% ok, no relocated blocks yet, and no other issues whatsoever.

So I'd like to brainstorm about this. For some reason an update wrecks the OS so far it can't boot anymore, apart from booting into recovery, and even booting from USB makes the disk not visible. When I restore an image of the machine (using a working machine) it returns to a working state, also in WinPE or recovery. That makes no sense to me at all - booting from USB should be independent of whatever is on that disk, and the actual disk should show up in diskpart for example. This means that any commands like sfc / scannow which seems to be the default answer on forums these days, is not going to work as the disk is simply not available. It's just as like the system marks the disk as 'bad' or something, while that gets reset when using the disk in another machine. That makes no sense to me at all either though.

It just doesn't make any sense from either hardware side (why does it work after restorintg an image?) neither from the software side (why does booting a WinPE disk not recignise the disk either, before restoring an image?). Would anyone have a clue?

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