WD drive not recognized on boot

That is strange. Have you noticed any issues with the drive? Not all drives are perfect when they come off the line. I have had to send a few hdd's back before because they were defective (similar issue with Seagate and Western Digital). That's why I'm asking. You possibly could have gotten a drive with issues from manufacturing (corrupt instruction set, bad chips, incomplete soldering during assembly, any number of issues).

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No issues with the drive, working great.

That will take some looking into. I may not be able to find the issue, but it doesn't mean I won't try. If you wouldn't mind giving me some time to look into this. Would you mind providing your system info again here (Computer make and model, maybe the output of lshw) ?

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Moved this to a new topic so as not to confuse anyone reading the other topic.

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Will post the output when i am behind my laptop.

Model: Acer Predator G9-793

Michel, while your gathering info to post so that Mr. Harvey can help you, would you also please update your profile to reflect which version of Zorin OS you are using?

Thanks!

Now in regards to PCIE NVME M.2 drives, they don't connect exactly the same as SATA drives do. M.2's use the PCIE gen 3 and gen 4 lanes on the motherboard, and they are usually configured in RAID.

I am still learning about these new drives myself, but what little I know, I understand like on my notebook for example, they have to be enabeld for RAID for both drives to be seen and used on the same motherboard.

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His drive that he is referring to is a Western Digital m2 sata drive. The Samsung nvme and sata drives are visible all the time.

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The western digital is also visible because zorin os in installed on it. I try to explain it more detailed today with screenshots. The topic title is not correct either.

@337harvey, here i made a nice video of it today. It happend again but now it did not see my Samsung 980 1TB NVMe m2 and also didn't see the Western Digital 1 1tb m2 SATA m2. The first time it happend (4-5 weeks ago) the Samsung 980 drive was visible as well (Windows 10 drive) the Western Digital (sandisk drive) was EMPTY back then and formatted in NTFS (i used it and made it empty). That was the first time i wanted to install linux and my WD drive was not visible in that part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8yBfXXeqSc

Good thing that you posted this video. Unless I am wrong, this looks like a clear bug with the installer software. And if other people come across this, we might be able to start seeing a pattern to confirm it. But for all we know, it may only happen with certain hardware.

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Michel, did your computer have Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST)? This is an intel fake raid that has been causing issues, especially with hybrid storage (ssd & hdd) setups. This might also cause issues with NVMe & sata hybrid setups.

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The IRST is installed in Windows 10 yes.

This might help:

I didn't get any errors during setup, only drives missing as shown in the video. Anyway Zorin is installed already 4-5 weeks ago on the WD drive. I manually formatted it with Gparted installed zorin manually only i messed things up (home root whatever i did, im a noob lol) so i did a reinstall back then, this time i could select the wd drive to install besides the windows 10 install (where it first didn't show up).

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So you think it was one of those PEBCAK?

No its not my error. For some reason zorin did not detect the drive(s) as shown in the video

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/PEBCAK

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Yeah i edited my post haha...already used google

Since you have IRST, the problem may be the fakeraid tables in the drives. Try turning off (disabling) IRST in windows. We can delete the raid table in the front of the drive. This should allow all drives to be recognized by any installer then.

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If you visit the following link and perform the commands under the link with the hash tags in post 5 or 6 it should get rid of the tables for you.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2020155

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