r/steamdeck

Post by: u/SimonNorman

Hi Guys. I've been the happy owner of an original 64 GB LCD since they finally shipped mine Q3. Despite all the times I could have desperately used a storage upgrade (damn you shader cache!!!) I never thought twice about swapping my NVMe because, despite being somewhat hardware savvy, I can't financially afford to tinker with my SD and risk breaking anything. Instead I followed the steps to move the offensive storage hog folders to the SD card and lived my portable gamer life mostly worry free. About a week ago I went to wake the SD from sleep and it was frozen on a black screen. Not unusual, so I did a restart. This time it froze on the logo. I powered down, removed the SD card and restarted again, now getting the multi-choice Steam OS boot screen giving me the option to boot existing A, previous B, or erase user data. I did some research and found I most likely had corrupted data and to try erasing user data, and if that didn't work to re-image the drive. After trial and errors I followed the steps to re-image the drive and landed on the Welcome screen of my "new" deck, only to have it freeze again during installation validation. I restarted, and this time it froze on the Welcome screen. Then just bad boots. I decided to again re-image the drive, and at this point began getting the error: _Failed to start mount of removable drive sda#_ The drive also couldn't be located in Dolphin, and the only drive appearing was my boot USB. After several more attempts of re-imaging the results were the same.

I decided that my issue must be failure of the OEM internal drive, so I bought a replacement. It arrived today and installed flawlessly, but after once again attempting to re-image the new NVMe I got the same errors. The new drive isn't recognized either.

Am I missing a step? I started a ticket with Valve, but I feel like this has to be a software issue. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?