computersavvy,

Your understanding of the problem is reversed. The drive is the original Dell drive. It is locked out on the machine, so not even seen by BIOS on boot up. It has to be reformatted to Ext4, and so an external adapter, that will fit it, is needed. That is what I am searching for, but never get enough info to find a working adapter.

Cheers!

TBNK

So my understanding is totally twisted, or you have changed goals.

In post 21 you gave us pictures comparing the Hynix drive to the original dell drive and showed the M.2 Hynix drive would not fit the non-standard dell connector on the motherboard.

In post 34 you indicated you wanted to get an M.2 to USB adapter to use the hynix drive.

Now you say you intend to use the dell drive.

Please quit bouncing and going in different directions.

I thought you had determined that even when booting from a live linux usb stick that you were unable to do anything with the dell drive. If that is correct then AFAIK there is nothing you can do about the dell drive except get a new one from them or pay one of their approved service centers to either unlock it or replace it.

If that understanding is wrong and you can see the dell drive when booted to linux then simply wipe out the old partition table and repartition the drive while booted up and continue from there.

OTOH, since you appear to already have the hynix drive with standard M.2 connections then the very low cost of the adapter to use it by usb seems a logical choice at this time. You can boot from a flash drive, install on the M.2 drive in the other usb port and continue from there.

I have very similar SSD it work normal in laptop.
What is problem, maybe I can help?