Well That was nice!

[twostops]

Well I turned the computer on last night and Ubuntu decided that not only would it load, but would not identify the hard drive.
I know that I wanted to reinstall Ubuntu, but at least give me a warning that things are going to go wrong LOL!:):):P

[lammert-nijhof]

Well I had the same problem with a refurbished Seagate 1TB SSHD. The SSHD died within a second after 3 months of infrequent usage. No problem with Ubuntu, bad luck with the drive electronics, parity differences between platters and cache.

[sdsurfer]

Timely post. I had my very first HD fail (ever) night before last, same symptom: Primary master failure.

This is on an MSI dual core desktop with three drives, dual boot Windows/Ubuntu 17.04. As it turns out, both the Windows and Linux drives were fine, it was the third, a WD 160 GB I used for backups only. It's release date was 2005, so, yeah. :-)

If you're running multiple drives, try disconnecting them one by one and see if it starts.

[yoshii]

Yeah, I can relate. Earlier today I upgraded Wine-staging and did a few normal security updates and now my Xubuntu partially crashes on boot, some kind of udev thing, and then the wifi isn't available. But I can boot just fine into Puppy Linux (as usual for the past few decades), and connect to the internet, so it's not my hardware. This has happened to me before. I really want to like the Ubuntu's but these types of issues seem to keep cropping up. But at least Xubuntu boots. I tried to install Manjaro, and it wouldn't even boot past grub!

Right now I'm downloading Antergos. Maybe if I have a minimal enough system there won't be enough stuff to break so easily. If it weren't so much work to get stuff running without crashes every few months, it'd be a lot of fun. I thought my Xubuntu was crash proof, but all it took was one or two normal updates to break it. :( And I'm actually a Xubuntu fan!