Asus EZ Mode: "no storage device present"

This is the harder one. The BIOS does not see any drive at all — not even as unbootable. Either the connection is bad, the BIOS is too old to recognise the drive, or the drive has died.

Step 1 — Hard power-cycle

Power off. Unplug the laptop or desktop. Press and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Plug back in. Boot.

This drains residual capacitance and clears any transient firmware state. It sounds too simple to mention but it fixes "no storage device" cases roughly 1 in 5 times — particularly after a forced shutdown or unexpected power loss.

Step 2 — Reseat the drive

Remove the bottom panel of the laptop (or the side panel of a desktop). Find the M.2 SSD (or 2.5" SATA drive).

M.2 NVMe — undo the single screw at the end of the drive. The SSD will pop up at a 30-degree angle. Pull it out, blow on the gold contacts, push it back in firmly until it sits flush, replace the screw.
2.5" SATA — disconnect both the data cable and the power cable, plug them back in firmly. Try a different SATA port and cable on a desktop.

Boot. Check Storage Information.

Step 3 — CMOS reset

If reseating did not help, reset the CMOS to clear any cached drive enumeration:

Desktop — find the small silver coin battery (CR2032) on the motherboard, remove for 60 seconds, replace.
Laptop — same battery, but it is under the bottom panel and sometimes hidden under tape or a tiny daughterboard. Search YouTube for "[your laptop model] CMOS battery" before you start.

Boot. The first boot after a CMOS reset is slow (the BIOS rescans everything) — wait a full minute before assuming nothing happened.

Step 4 — Test the drive elsewhere

If the BIOS still does not see the drive, take it out and plug it into a USB-to-NVMe (or USB-to-SATA) enclosure — these are £8 on Amazon and worth owning.

Plug the enclosure into another working machine.

Drive shows up on the other machine → the drive is fine. The Asus's M.2 slot or SATA controller has failed (or the BIOS is too old for the drive — see Step 5).
Drive does not show up on the other machine either → the drive has died. Time for a replacement.

Step 5 — BIOS update (last resort if drive is fine)

If you have a newer SSD (Gen 4 NVMe, Gen 5 NVMe, or a brand-new model) in an older Asus board, it is possible the BIOS does not have the firmware to enumerate that controller. Asus has released BIOS updates for this on multiple boards.

Find your laptop's exact model number (or motherboard model on a desktop), go to the Asus support page for it, and check for a BIOS update with release notes mentioning "NVMe", "M.2", or "storage compatibility".

If you cannot boot to update through Windows, Asus's BIOS Flashback feature (on most Z- and X-series motherboards) can flash the BIOS from a USB stick without any working drive or operating system.

If none of this worked

You are looking at one of three possibilities:

The motherboard's storage controller has failed — common on Asus boards from 2017-2019 with poor heatsink contact on the chipset.
A short circuit on the motherboard is killing the drive every time it spins up. You would notice this as the laptop sometimes refusing to power on at all.
The drive really is dead and Step 4 was a false negative (some failed drives appear briefly in another machine before disappearing).

Frequently asked

Is "no storage device present" the same as "no bootable device"? +

No, they mean different things. "No storage device present" means the BIOS cannot detect any drive at all — a hardware problem. "No bootable device" means the BIOS sees the drive but cannot find Windows on it — a software/bootloader problem. The fixes are different.

My SSD was working yesterday and now shows "no storage device". Did it die? +

Possibly, but check the easy stuff first: power-cycle (unplug, hold power 30 seconds), reseat the M.2 SSD or SATA cable, try a CMOS reset. NVMe SSDs from 2018-2021 do fail suddenly — controller failures can take a working drive offline overnight — but the rate is not high enough to assume the worst before reseating.

Will a BIOS update fix this? +

Sometimes — particularly if you have a newer drive (Gen 4 or Gen 5 NVMe) in an older Asus board with stale firmware. Asus has shipped BIOS updates specifically to add detection support for new SSD controllers. Check Asus support for your model and look for an update mentioning "NVMe compatibility".