The Debian installer fails to recognize the NVMe SSD during setup.
The Debian installer fails to recognize the NVMe SSD during setup.
Hello, forum members. I recently purchased an NVMe SSD to enable dual booting Windows 10 and Debian 9 on my Alienware 15. My goal is to primarily use Debian but still need Windows for gaming. Although Windows recognizes the new drive, the Debian installer isn’t detecting it. When I attempt to open a shell and run 'fdisk -l', the disk isn’t showing up. I want to create a fresh Debian partition and a swap partition on the NVMe drive while keeping the other two laptop drives unchanged. Anyone have suggestions on why Debian isn’t showing up?
What SSD and Debian release did you use? I encountered similar problems where drives were only detected with specific OS, BIOS, and drive types. Eventually, I resolved it without fully grasping the details. The full account is in this discussion: you might want to explore a different Linux installer or consider updating your BIOS... maybe
I prefer not to swap the drives since I want the leave windows unchanged. The other M.2 slot is currently set for the C drive in Windows. Regarding AHCI, it shouldn’t impact anything because it applies only to SATA and this drive is NVMe.
But is the slot a new NVMe drive in an NVMe or SATA setup? The manual mentions lane allocations—some slots offer four lanes while others have just two. Both seem capable of supporting NVMe, but one also works with SATA. BIOS screenshots (pressing F12 to open a formatted FAT32 USB) can help confirm if both NVMe and SATA are recognized. If it doesn’t appear in the UFEI, it likely isn’t present.
It seems the setup might need additional components or a different kernel configuration. You may want to disable ACPI during installation, especially on older systems. Consider backing up your Windows NVMe drive before proceeding. You could set up a dual-boot configuration using one card with both partitions and another with the root partition. Verify if the new drive appears in Disk Manager. If it does, you might clone the Windows card to the new drive, swap them, and test dual-boot on the new drive in the primary slot—this could require some adjustments. Also, modify the boot order in BIOS and try installing from an ISO image on a USB drive via UEFI. Don’t forget to check the BIOS raid settings and related configurations. For future upgrades, consider sticking with ASUS or reputable ACER brands, though I tend to avoid laptops due to limited upgrade options.
I'm exploring installation through UEFI since I've been using the old boot mode. It's curious you faced issues with Dell but not Acer. I owned an Acer laptop that kept having problems, while my Dell stayed fine. Since my Windows partition won't be heavily used after dual booting, I'm thinking about putting it on the Windows drive as a backup, because that one is only 128 GB and this new one is 1 TB. I'm really puzzled about why it's not working.