How to force disk discovery from external drive, Fedora 42 KDE?

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1

I am trying to use a Sabrent thunderbolt 3 nvme m.2 drive enclosure with Fedora 42 on an ASUS Flow Z13 2025. The system shows that the thunderbolt device successfully connects, is authorized, enrolled, trusted; but it does not recognize any drive. It does not show up in KDE partition manager, lsblk, fdsisk, nor lsusb. The device does show up in boltctl:

Sabrent Enclosure
├─ type: peripheral
├─ name: Enclosure
├─ vendor: Sabrent
├─ uuid: c9030000-0092-9098-206b-55c354a13106
├─ generation: Thunderbolt 3
├─ status: authorized
│ ├─ domain: a0f43804-e062-b2a0-ffff-ffffffffffff
│ ├─ rx speed: 40 Gb/s = 2 lanes * 20 Gb/s
│ ├─ tx speed: 40 Gb/s = 2 lanes * 20 Gb/s
│ └─ authflags: none
├─ authorized: Fri 23 Jan 2026 07:21:19 PM UTC
├─ connected: Fri 23 Jan 2026 07:21:18 PM UTC
└─ stored: Thu 22 Jan 2026 09:40:38 PM UTC
├─ policy: iommu
└─ key: no

The device itself appears functional as I can use it with Windows and even use it as a bootable device from the bios. I just can’t get fedora to recognize that there is a drive. I also tried fedora 43 from a thumb drive and had the same result. I have tried 2 different samsung ssd’s in the enclosure, both are not showing up in fedora.

I ran sudo dmesg and found no error messages:

thunderbolt 0-2: new device found, vendor=0x1df device=0x108
thunderbolt 0-2: Sabrent Enclosure
thunderbolt 0-0:2.1: new retimer found, vendor=0x1da0 device=0x8833

In the Z13’s bios I have not been able to find any security settings aside from completely disabling the port or disabling support for mass storage, which I have enabled.

Is there any method to forcing the discovery of a drive? Is there something else I’m missing?

2

Does the Sabrent claim to support Linux? Try searching for your enclosure in the LHDB to see how it works for others on linux.

3

In the KDE settings, there should be a Thunderbolt section, does it say anything useful or have something you need to enable? I know in my Gnome settings there is a setting I can change to allow direct access to devices, so not sure if KDE has something similar.

4

It does not claim to support linux. Sadly it may be that is simply not supported. I also tried a USB4 enclosure from Hyper and had issues with it in Fedora. I guess I just have to stick to devices that are definitely supported. I mistakenly assumed if thunderbolt and usb4 were supported it would be universal.

5

No. It is “Connected & Authorized, Trusted” and Enabled. The only option is to Disable or Revoke Trust.

I’m going to try a different distro and see if it’s fedora specific.

6

have you tried to issue a pci rescan?

# echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan
7

New and complicated standards mean early implementations may need vendor firmware updates for compliance. Some vendors offer incomplete support and get away with it by providing Windows drivers that support their hardware “quirks”.

Have a look at https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/thunderbolt.html.

8

Thanks, I gave up and returned the enclosure. I’ll look for one that specifically advertises supporting linux.

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