No distro will see my hard drive (without removing/disabling dmraid)

evilmegaman · 10-07-2018, 11:18 PM

Quote:

So NO linux distro can seem to be installed on my new pc, and I find it very upsetting. I simply want to dual boot, but the hard drive is not recognized when I get to the part of any installer where it comes time to select partitions. It just shows an empty list, and when I click +, -, or change on the linux mint installation specifically it crashes with a ubiquity error.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1064151

This seems to be one of the closest copies of the issue I'm having.

so I uninstalled dmraid, (apt-get remove dmraid) and lo and behold now I can get to the point where the installer sees my hard drive! and it even allows me to install!

SO i successfully installed and when it boots ubuntu and windows boot manager are available in the UEFI boot loader, but unfortunately the "ubuntu" selection (which would actually be linux mint) just simply says "boot error". I since deleted the EFI entry because apparently when I checked my partitions the free, unallocated space on the hard drive never got filled at all. so effectively the only thing the installer did was change the efi settings..

Some other steps I took to try to resolve this:

disabled TPM 2.0
disabled secureboot
disabled UEFI mode
turned CSM on
and all the combinations of all these things.

The most interesting piece of information I've noticed is that when I boot the computer with CSM on and UEFI turned off and "legacy" turned on, I can't even boot windows (let alone linux) and it gives me an option to go to this screen: https://ibb.co/cd1fb9

It gives me the option to "reset disks to non-raid" and to exit, everything else is grayed out. Which is also interesting because it lists my hard drive as "incompatible" on that same screen.

I highly suspect this all might have something to do with the way the computer has merged the intel optane memory with the hard drive.

this is the computer in question if this helps diagnose anything: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6883101677

thank you!

I put the information above in quotes because it's a repost from the linuxmint forums. but it's not really linuxmint specific. I've tried fedora, mageia, ubuntu, and linux mint so far. The common theme is that the installers hang up or crash or give me no options when it gets to the partitioning section. Odd note is that I can browse through the windows folder in the file browser! So what gives? :-/

if I were to completely erase the hard drive is that going to actually fix the issue? ugh

syg00 · 10-07-2018, 11:48 PM

Probably, but just a few k should do - messes with partition table/MBR though. Have a look at dmsetup to get rid of any signatures on the disk.