Inspiron 5379 linux ssd not visible.

Question

Hello,tried to install Mint18.3 on Dell Inspiron 5379 ( i7-8550U, 16GB DDR4, 512 GB SSD) with windows 10 preinstalled. I am trying to purge windows and want to intall linux mint 18.3 cinnamon (No dual boot). The laptop hardware specs can be found here: www.dell.com/.../pdI can boot into Linux mint live CD, but if i try to install the system i get an error that the computer has only 0.0 B disk space available. The SSD is not visible in GParted. The 'lsblk' command does not list the ssd. I installed lsscsi to list all SATA devices and it shows only the USB CD-ROM with the live CD, but not the SSD disk.The only hint that something went wrong during the boot sequence is the following in the dmesg output'ahci 000:00:17.0: controller rest failed (0x80000001)'I searched for threads with a similar problem and found this ubuntuforums.org/showthread.phpIn BIOS i have selected 'system configuration'  -> 'SATA operation' > AHCI (SATA is configured for AHCI mode)My BIOS does not seem to give me the option to 'disable raid' nor can i disable 'Intel SRT' The SSD disk is visible in BIOS (SATA-0 device ID: SAMSUNG SSD PM871b 2.5 7mm 512GB) , and i can boot into windows 10. So there is no hardware error with the disk.  I tried also to use an ARCH linux live CD since it has a newer kernel (4.13 vs 4.10 in Mint 18.3) but the behavior is identical, i even got the same error in dmesg  'ahci 000:00:17.0: controller rest failed (0x80000001)'I tried to boot with 'nvme_load=YES' option, but again no effect.Any ideas what i could try to make that SSD disk visible under linux?

ieee488 · Answer

Is your PC UEFI only?

Inspiron5379 · Answer

No, it also supports legacy mode. I tried to boot with legacy and no change. I think there is some issue with either BIOS or the linux live CD on this particular computer (kernel not supporting hw).

Yesterday i made some tests. I wanted to see if the issue is caused by the live CD, BIOS or maybe the SSD disk with windows 10 on it. So i simply opened the laptop, unmounted the original SSD disk and replaced it with a another one i had laying around (With linux on it already). I rebooted the laptop booting from the live CD, but the new SSD is still not visible.... so the issue is not caused by the win10 SSD.

Funny thing is... at first i forgot to plug in the CD drive with the live CD while booting and viola the system attempted to boot from inserted SSD (which didnt succeed because there was an old linux version on it). So the good news is.... found a workaround!!!

Today i took the original SSD that came with the DELL laptop, inserted it into another old laptop, wiped win10, installed Linux Mint 18.3, updated the kernel to 4.14.4, reinserted the SSD into into the new DELL laptop and booted.... and voila! It appears everything is working. :)

Xiaoyi · Answer

I have just received my desktop XPS 8930 this week, and tried to wipe out Windows and install Fedora linux.  I also have the issue that Fedora installer don't see the M.2 SSD drive, but only see the SATA HDD.  My work around is to change the boot option to legacy from UEFI, and the install will see the SSD.  I would like to use UEFI boot (with secure boot off) on my machine too.  I will try your trick of put the SSD on my 4 year-old XPS and if I can install Fedora that way, then take it back to my new XPS.  The old XPS in UEFI mode can see the SATA SSD just fine.

ejn63 · Answer

What version of Fedora are you running?  You'll need a new (or other very recent) release to support NVMe, which is the drive you have.

ieee488 · Answer

forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php

darthinvader012 · Answer

I know this is an old post so for anyone else, I turned my SSD's SATA configuration to AHCI instead of RAID and it did the trick. Edit: I didn't read the article properly so please ignore this.

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