NVME croaked! deceased! fail! etc

MNT Pocket Reform
1

Suddenly and all at once. Not a Pocket issue per se. Hadn’t used it in a couple weeks, was doing apt upgrade, reading a book. I look over the screen is black. Hmm, not asleep, it powered off? OK…

Powered back on and rebooted, opened a terminal. Tried to run apt upgrade again and ‘lock’ complaints; it was running in the background. Hmmm OK. Did ps ax, saw reasonable processes unfold and complete, finally it was done. OK…

Ran my scripts that update project folders from main machine (rsync) to the Pocket, in the middle of a file, rsync unexpected closure. Can’t ping main machine, DNS error (it’s always DNS?)

sync sync reboot… boot fails, can’t mount home (the nvme). This is an A311D upgraded machine. / and /boot on the internal are fine. /dev/nvme* doesn’t exist except something called /dev/nvme-fabric (…web search…) looks like something in the NVME itself has died. Can’t fsck what does not exist.

This morning, took the cover off, all’s well, pulled the NVME out, reinstalled, no change.

Not expecting any solutions, just complaining to the universe. I’ve not had many M.2 NVME’s, and this is the first failure.

I’ll probably find a replacement tomorrow, if there are any knowledgeable hints or brands to select or avoid, please post! 1TB…

A311D won't boot & no keyboard input after kernel 6.18.3 update (temporary fix)
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Did you see the pinned post describing problems with A311D being able to see the nvme?

Did you try the nvme in another computer?

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I hadn’t! But just read the thread. But it makes sense that the apt upgrade was the trigger. But / and /boot are on the mmblk so I’m booting OK, just no /home.

On the phone now, will reread and post there.

Thank you!

4

Another thing you can try is to flash one of the older system images to an sd-card. Here is a list:

https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-system-image/#old-image-downloads

The image from 2025-11-05 seems like a good pick because it’s with kernel 6.17.

If you still experience problems with that image as well: Did you also flash the most recent u-boot? You could try running sudo reform-flash-uboot --zero emmc (but you might want to use a more recent system image for that command) and then A311D will load u-boot from your sd-card instead of from emmc.

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My Pocket boots from EMMC, / and /boot. My nvme contains /home only.

I formatted a microSD, edited fstab to boot with microSD as /home, and the machine is working.

dmesg shows many

meson-pcie fc000000.pcie: error: wait linkup timeout

and in /dev is nvme-fabrics, only.

I’m running 6.18.5. I just did apt update (only), list –upgradeable doesn’t show any other candidate. Because for whatever reason my system seems stable-ish I will leave it all alone for now. You all have your hands full and I can afford to wait.

But since I’m booting EMMC OK when there’s something newer than 6.18.5 to try I can volunteer.

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The above link has a 6.19 RC6 kernel that seems to work. I am hoping it makes it in the repository soon.

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Maybe. Maybe not. This is only a release candidate kernel, not an official release yet. We also don’t know yet whether maybe 6.19~rc6 breaks something for others.

If those on A311D with the Taifast SSD (I think this is the only known hardware combination which has problems on 6.18) would like to use 6.19, then they can add this apt source into their system:

deb [trusted=yes arch=arm64] https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-debian-packages/-/jobs/18097/artifacts/raw/repo reform main

You could for example boot with the system image with kernel 6.19, then use reform-rescue-shell to get a shell into your system on nvme/emmc and add above line into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linux6.19rc6.list. Then you can apt upgrade and apt full upgrade to 6.19.

But please only try this out if you also feel confident that you can fix problems which might arise from using the experimental kernel. I will of course try and assist if you need help.

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My NVME is a Taifast, 1TB. I found a known good Samsung 128 GB M.2 stick, it does not mount either, on 6.18.5. Doesn’t show up in /dev. Same errors in dmesg. So not only the Taifast has this problem.

Installed 6.19~rc6~* from the repo URL above. With the Samsung stick installed, no NVME device appeared in /dev.

Removed that and installed the original Taifast M.2. It appears in /dev as expected and it seems fine.

Is the Samsung device not attaching correctly expected?

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@tomicdesu it depends on the model of Samsung 128GB M.2. I do not believe m2 SATA drives are supported. It is possible that the Samsung drive is SATA not NVME.

1 Like
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Ahh. Well it fit in the socket! No problem anyhoo, it was a castoff.