My issue is pretty self explanatory: I can’t see my disk anywhere in my live USB, while it does show in Windows, this means I can’t install Fedora.
The default installer shows no disks available, and the KDE Partition manager shows my USB and zram0 for some reason?
I tried looking around and most solutions involved changing the disk mode to AHCI, but I couldn’t see any option for it in my bios.
I have a Honor laptop from around 2022 although I’m not sure about the exact model. I tried updating my bios, but the official guide mentioned either using the device manager app through the driver update tab which marked all drivers as up to date.
I should probably also mention that the bios itself or Windows sometimes don’t detect the SSD, especially after restarting. Shutting down also doesn’t seem to work properly, as the screen stays black but I can tell my laptop is still on since the fans keep running. I need to force it to shut down by holding the power button. If I turn it on immediately after, I get a Failed to boot or No boot device found error, and the bios shows no disks. I can usually fix this by turning off the computer again, waiting for a minute and two and then turning it on again (sort of like a power cycle except I have to force my computer to shut down). After that, the disk does get recognized by the bios and I can boot into Windows.
Booting into the USB also causes the disk to be “unloaded” (I’m not really sure how to call this), as Windows does show in the boot menu (but in the issue I mentioned before it doesn’t and I just see no boot options).
Also I didn’t use this computer for 3 years as it wasn’t charging since the charging port broke. We did repair it once, but it stopped working about a week later, I got lended a computer and stopped using this laptop until a few days ago when I got it repaired. This laptop never gave me any issues like this until now.
I had also installed Linux on it previously, I had 4 operating systems installed: Zorin, Kali, Fedora, and Windows (Don’t ask, I don’t know what I was thinking back then). Oddly enough, in grub the only boot options were Zorin and Kali, and Fedora wasn’t visible. I tried reading my fedora files on zorin but they didn’t show in the file explorer, and in Windows using this linux reader did allow me to see my files in Zorin and Kali, but not in Fedora, where it got stuck reading until 96% and then froze. Kali also couldn’t boot and showed an error.
Anyways I thought that they might be causing issues so I got a few files that I wanted to back up, and then deleted their partitions, with Fedora first, thinking they might’ve gotten corrupted somehow and that was causing the issue. I also removed the grub instances from all 4 and stayed only with Windows. This still unfortunately didn’t fix the issue though, I couldn’t install Fedora and was also stuck with Windows now. I wanted to delete my whole disk and reinstall Windows, so I tried making a Windows installer USB and didn’t meet the Windows 11 upgrade requirements?? (I was inside Windows 11). I decided to just settle for a reset, it took a bit of babysitting since I had to force my computer to turn off, then wait, then turn it back on each time it had to restart but then it was done.
That leads you up until now, where I still have the disk issues, and Fedora doesn’t detect my disk. I’m a bit lost on what to do now so I need help. I have safe boot off, and I also didn’t see any option to change the disk mode to AHCI which seems to fix the issue for most people.
Someone mentioned that sometimes it’s only the installer that doesn’t detect the disk, but this is not the case for me, because running sudo fdisk -l prints this:
GPT PMBR size mismatch (6378599 != 60538880) will be corrected by write.
Disk /dev/sda: 28.87 GiB, 30995907072 bytes, 60538881 sectors
Disk model: DataTraveler 3.0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 09D661A4-D7D4-4D99-8EC7-B91E3365D7F0
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 64 6317095 6317032 3G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda2 6317096 6378535 61440 30M EFI System
Disk /dev/loop0: 2.71 GiB, 2908037120 bytes, 5679760 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/zram0: 7.49 GiB, 8040480768 bytes, 1963008 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
And inxi -Dzxx prints this:
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 28.87 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Kingston model: DataTraveler 3.0 size: 28.87 GiB
type: USB rev: 3.2 spd: 5 Gb/s lanes: 1 serial: <filter>
I know that my issue is really specific but I don’t really know where to ask and you know more than I do so this feels like a good place to get help in. Also I know that my post is really disorganized, I’m sorry about that. I just don’t really know what order to put this information in, I might reorganize it later. Anyways if you need more information please let me know and I’ll be sure to send it.
TLDR:
- I left my computer unused for a while, repaired its charging port, then the SSD started failing
- The ssd stops being detected after a shutdown or restart and I need to power cycle my laptop for it to get recognized
- While sometimes it does get recognized by Windows and the bios, it never gets detected by the Fedora Live USB no matter what (and booting into the Fedora USB seems to unload it)
- I made the Fedora USB twice (once it worked with two other computers and I made it with rufus, the second I made it with the official Fedora Media Writer), and it didn’t work any time
- I don’t have an option to change my disk mode to AHCI, or any other mode at all
- Secure boot is off
