Installing Fedora on a HP Z840 with M2 Drive

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I’ve run into a problem installing Fedora after Windows 11 for a Dual-Boot environment on my HP Z840 Workstation. Although Fedora recognised other drives on the system, my Windows drive and its remaining space did not show up. This was a Samsung EVO 970 drive I had left about half un-allocated for the Linux installation. Neither GRUB nor the Fedora live system saw the partitions.

Turns out that this is caused by a BIOS setting: there’s a default device setting for the SATA controller that’s set to RAID (under Advanced – Device Configurations). Other options here are AHCI and IDE. As it happens, RAID will prevent Linux distros from seeing M2 drives – for whatever reason. Switching this to AHCI solved the problem.

Thanks to kahupaa on Reddit for this tip!



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