[SOLVED] Installing Slackware Live on an NVME drive.
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I am trying to install Slackware Live PLASMA 5 onto an older system that I've installed an NVME drive with a PCI-E adapter. The system is older, but it's still UEFI. The machine will not boot from the NVME drive, but I think I can boot from a recognized drive, then have it switch to booting from the NVME drive.
When I boot up my machine on Slackware Live, it can see and find the NVME drive, but when I run setup2hd, it doesn't find the NVME option as a drive. When I try to run Slackware 14.2 DVD installer, it does the same. Is there a way around this?
When I boot up my machine on Slackware Live, it can see and find the NVME drive, but when I run setup2hd, it doesn't find the NVME option as a drive.
Did you partition your NVMe drive before you ran 'setup2hd'? Just like Slackware, the setup will only list partitions with a suitable Partition Type (i.e. 'linux') to choose from.
Did you partition your NVMe drive before you ran 'setup2hd'? Just like Slackware, the setup will only list partitions with a suitable Partition Type (i.e. 'linux') to choose from.
Yes. I have about 4 or 5 drives in the machine, some have existing installs of Slackware, some do no not. It picks up all the SATA drives, not the NVME, but the NVME is on a PCI-E card. It's not an m.2 SATA, but an m.2 PCI-E. Does that matter? The bios doesn't pick it up either, but it picks up all the other drives that that setup2hd does.
I am pretty sure if I picked an m.2 SATA drive this wouldn't be an issue.
I am monitoring this thread with interest. I installed -current on a Gigabyte M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (x2) NVMe 1.3 SSD with no issue. However, I was not using Slackware live, I was using the -current non-live .iso.
I am also very interested to see how you go with getting your system set up with persistent naming if you have four or five internal drives. I struggled and failed to get -current installed on a machine with four internal drives. I'll be interested to see how you go about it. Needless to say, getting the OS installed is only going to be the first hurdle. Good luck.
Last edited by Lysander666; 01-06-2020 at 09:13 AM.
I am monitoring this thread with interest. I installed -current on a Gigabyte M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (x2) NVMe 1.3 SSD with no issue. However, I was not using Slackware live, I was using the -current non-live .iso.
I am also very interested to see how you go with getting your system set up with persistent naming if you have four or five internal drives. I struggled and failed to get -current installed on a machine with four internal drives. I'll be interested to see how you go about it. Needless to say, getting the OS installed is only going to be the first hurdle. Good luck.
My system is an older AMD FM1 system, the Llano APUs. The motherboards can't see NVME on an PCI-E card. Newer systems shouldn't be a problem. This thing is almost 10 years old.
What utility did you partition the drive with? I'm surprised anything is seeing the drive at all if your bios is not showing it.
fdisk sees it, cfdisk sees it.
I can even access it and drop any files I want to on it like a regular drive when I've booted into any O/S. Only when I try to install an O/S on it, it can't find it.
I can even access it and drop any files I want to on it like a regular drive when I've booted into any O/S. Only when I try to install an O/S on it, it can't find it.
James
Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesGT
My system is an older AMD FM1 system, the Llano APUs. The motherboards can't see NVME on an PCI-E card. Newer systems shouldn't be a problem. This thing is almost 10 years old.
You might have found the root of the problem.
My Asus motherboard from 2012 can accept an NVME SSD through PCI-E, but similar to your case the bios won't see it and the board won't boot to it.
My motherboard (and actually the 09-2012 Mac Pros) could only be made to boot to NVME PCI-E adapted SSDs by way of a firmware hack.
You could try looking for a hacked bios for your motherboard but unless you have a very popular board I wouldn't expect (or even necessarily recommend) it. There's one for my Asus board but I chose not to go down that rabbit hole.
If you have a small SATA SSD or something lying around you could probably put the boot loader on that and have it just point to the NVME drive, but that might defeat the purpose. For what it's worth you aren't likely to see any significant gains in terms of OS responsiveness by switching to NVME from SATA, OS I/O is mostly tons of little reads scattered around and benefit greatly just from SSD's not having seek time like hard drives do.
If you have a small SATA SSD or something lying around you could probably put the boot loader on that and have it just point to the NVME drive, but that might defeat the purpose. For what it's worth you aren't likely to see any significant gains in terms of OS responsiveness by switching to NVME from SATA, OS I/O is mostly tons of little reads scattered around and benefit greatly just from SSD's not having seek time like hard drives do.
That's ok. That's what I am thinking I need to do with the boot loader. It doesn't even need to be an SSD, just a thumb drive recovery, enter the boot drive...off I go. I think that's ok for me for what I want to do.
Yes, going with an SSD is probably the right way to go with this system, and maybe I will...but I want to give this a go first. When it becomes a hassle, I'll just get the SSD.
I guess there is no additional issues. Installed Slackware Live Plasma 5 on my PCI-E carded NVME drive with setup2hd, created a USB boot stick and when it boots up it goes straight to the OS. Perfect!
I did install 14.2 as a test to make sure I could do it first and when I tested the drive for speed as I wanted to see what kind of speeds I would be getting. I was getting about 1.0Gb/s write, 1.2Gb/s read. With Slackware Live Plasma 5 it looks like about 700Mb/s read and write.
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