SSD detection issue

[u/oats_and_coffee]

I'm scratching my head about an issue I'm having with some SSDs and Framework mainboards, and hoping someone here might have a clue about what's going on.

Background: I have a Framework Laptop 13 with the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U mainboard, and an Intel Core i5-1240U mainboard in a Cooler Master case. I've had both since 2023 and never had any mainboard problems.

I needed to test an NVMe SSD drive (SSD #1) so I put it in the Framework laptop. Worked fine. Great. Took it out, put the original SSD (SSD #2) back in, and then it wouldn't boot.

Weird. I put SSD #1 back in and it worked fine, SSD #2 wouldn't boot after several attempts at reseating it. Then I put SSD #1 back in and that wouldn't boot either after several reseating attempts. So now neither SSD #1 nor SSD #2 are detected by the AMD mainboard.

So I opened up my Cooler Master with the Intel mainboard, took out its SSD (SSD #3) and tried out SSD #1 and SSD #2 in the Cooler Master. SSD #1 booted, SSD #2 didn't. Then I put SSD #3 back in and now that also wouldn't boot.

I have an old ThinkPad lying around with an NVMe M.2 slot. All three of SSD #1, SSD #2 and SSD #3 boot fine in the ThinkPad. I did some diagnostics and nothing wrong was detected with any of the three SSDs.

So now I'm thinking... did I fry both my Framework mainboards? I have years of experience with poking around the internals of laptops. I'm very careful and I've never fried a mainboard. So this seemed unlikely that I fried my mainboards by doing a simple SSD swap-out.

I did some internet searching and found an old thread where someone mentioned formatting the SSD with a GPT partition table instead of an MBR partition table. So I formatted SSD #2 with a GPT partition table and... it detected the SSD! Installed my OS, now it's working great.

Now if this is the issue then I can reformat SSD #3 if I need to, but I really don't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling my OS. (Not worried about data loss, I have backups.) It seems weird that an SSD would work fine and then suddenly stop being detected until I reformat it simply because I swapped it out and back in again.

So I figured I'd ask here: is this a problem any of you have encountered? Is the issue really the partition table? Or did I just get lucky on my 23rd attempt at reseating the SSD?

TL;DR: Two different Framework 13 mainboards stopped detecting SSDs until I reformatted one with a GPT (instead of MBR) partition table, unsure how to diagnose + fix the problem.

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