I used mediawriter to create a bootable flash drive. When I try to install Fedora, it finds no harddrives.
I read I am supposed to change SATA mode to AHCI. In BIOS SATA mode isn’t editable. Am I out of luck?
What motherboard and BIOS are you running? I’m genuinely surprised that there’s no way to change from IDE or RAID to AHCI .
Is this machine pretty old (like 20+ years old!)
Someone on Reddit had a similar problem and got it working with F38 install.
You can find old installs via Index of /pub/Mirrors/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/38
If you don’t want to do that (coz you have to upgrafe twice after) please post much more info about your setup.
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It is a laptop that I bought new last month. An Acer swift 3. The cheapest I could find. So, it is not easy for me to share info about the motherboard.
Thanks! I’ll try that.
What information is in bios about the drive. Most of the newer laptops may have the device in RAID mode, and there are some devices where fedora is unable to see the drive when using the built in raid controller. This is why it is suggested in those situations to switch the SATA config from RAID to AHCI in bios.
In BIOS the hard drive is only described in the information tab which is not editable. It says “Optane without RAID”.
Is there a ‘device’ tab, a ‘storage’ tab or similar.?
Are there prompts at the bottom for additional screens?
On my laptop I first get the information screen but at the bottom are some prompts.
F7 then gives me the advanced mode and in that mode the ‘advanced’ tab allows setting the SATA config.
None of that. It’s the cheapest laptop I could find. I’m hoping starting with release 38 will save me.
Release fedora 38 will not help you much to install on new hardware like you describe. Download at lease fedora 42 or fedora beta 43 from web page www.getfedora.org and put it on usb-stick .Try it this way
Are you on Windows 11? If you can pull up ‘system information’ it should show you all the basic specs of laptop. Most new systems use AHCI as default. IDE is deprecated…was for spinning drives before NVME technology, RAID mode is only used (typically) if there are multiple drives in the laptop. That is very uncommon for consumer grade hardware.
Check and see if Bitlocker is turned on, that is usually on by default for new laptops. If it is, you may need to turn it off before trying to install Fedora.
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Cheapest laptop does not necessarily mean extremely limited bios. Most newer bios in the various systems at least provide similar user config functions even with different hardware.
If you are unable to find the configs mentioned then one idea might be to return it and check for better bios support before buying.
Is there any mention on any of the pages within the BIOS of “Intel Rapid Storage Technology” or “Intel RST”?
You could always try updating the whatever the latest BIOS is for this particular SKU just in case it’s an older piece of kit which has been lying on a shelf for 3 years before being sold to you.
Is there anything in the “Main” tab? Does hitting Ctrl-S in that tab help?
(Based on this Acer forum thread, which admittedly is a bit old and may not apply to your BIOS.)
I had forgotten about the naming. The RST seems to be another name for the raid controller, so if that is there then disabling that within bios might assist with the drive config.