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#1 2020-01-22 05:15:17

Archer2020
Member
Registered: 2020-01-22
Posts: 1

NVMe SSD in Lenovo Thinkpad E595 not detected after install

Hi everyone.

I just recently bought a Lenovo Thinkpad E595 and wanted to install Arch on it for the first time. Beforehand, I installed Arch on it in a VM successfully multiple times, so I wanted to try the real deal. Unfortunately, it hasn't gone well so far. After scouring the internet for various possible solutions, I haven't come across any yet, and it seems my issue is a little peculiar so may be indicative of some newer issue happening.

Here's what I've done already:
- Made a live Arch USB
- Followed the wiki install guide carefully, once with a GPT/efi setup and (later) once with MBR/BIOS setup
- Each time I don't come across any errors, and it seems to all run smoothly, until after rebooting - the system doesn't start. And even stranger, booting up the live disk again shows no trace of my SSD when running lsblk or fdisk -l. This was persistent even after fiddling with every possible BIOS setting I could think of tweaking. In particular, there's no "AHCI" string anywhere, which seems to have solved a similar problem for a lot of other users. In addition, booting from the SSD wasn't even an option when pressing F12 at start.
- To get back to a functioning system (to try again), I made a live USB for Linux Mint, totally wiped the drive and installed that, then went back to the live Arch USB - which now detected my SSD and allowed me to repeat (trying the MBR approach next). The SSD was also now a bootable drive from the F12 menu at start. After another attempt, I ended up at the same place with no detected SSD and presumably needing to reinstall Mint to even see the drive....

I should mention of course that dmesg | grep -i error, fail, unable, nvme, ssd, drive, and everything else I can think of make no reference to anything resembling a drive.

Right now the system doesn't have an OS on it since I'm back at the point where it cannot detect my SSD on the live disk. I haven't come across this sort of glitch anywhere else online, despite a decent number of similar problems. Since it seems to be reproduce-able, I was wondering if this was some known obscure bug I haven't found anywhere yet and was hoping someone could share some insight.

Thanks for reading.

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#2 2020-01-22 08:22:24

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,425

Re: NVMe SSD in Lenovo Thinkpad E595 not detected after install

Archer2020 wrote:

- Each time I don't come across any errors, and it seems to all run smoothly, until after rebooting - the system doesn't start. And even stranger, booting up the live disk again shows no trace of my SSD when running lsblk or fdisk -l. This was persistent even after fiddling with every possible BIOS setting I could think of tweaking. In particular, there's no "AHCI" string anywhere, which seems to have solved a similar problem for a lot of other users. In addition, booting from the SSD wasn't even an option when pressing F12 at start.
.

You should look for a RAID string and change that to AHCI. But if that was the case I would suspect Linux Mint to also have trouble.

It's hard to say anything just from descriptions, post a dmesg from the live USB while it's "not detecting" your SSD (maybe for comparisons sake one while it does detect the SSD) as well as

efibootmgr -v

while booted in UEFI mode. You can use a pastebin client to do this.

Last edited by V1del (2020-01-22 08:23:42)

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#3 2020-01-22 13:40:42

Head_on_a_Stick
Member
From: London
Registered: 2014-02-20
Posts: 7,680
Website

Re: NVMe SSD in Lenovo Thinkpad E595 not detected after install

Is Secure Boot disabled? It wouldn't cause your drive to go missing but it might stop it from appearing as a bootable device. Mint supports Secure Boot IIRC.

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#4 2020-01-22 17:22:43

Archer20
Banned
Registered: 2020-01-22
Posts: 1

Re: NVMe SSD in Lenovo Thinkpad E595 not detected after install

Hi everyone, this is the OP (I accidentally didn't set my new password right and lost the old one). This whole thread is quite embarrassing and should probably be deleted. I ended up missing the step to generate the locale - twice - in my installation attempts which apparently had all sorts of crazy negative consequences. For whatever reason, the Arch gods allowed me to boot into the system after letting it sit off for a while, and then I was able to generate the locale info in the system, after installing. Everything seems to be more or less working properly now, though it does seem like there's some issues with detecting the drive in a live session still.

Thanks for your willingness to help! FYI, for those above: there's nothing pertaining to RAID in the BIOS settings either, and Secure Boot is definitely disabled. I don't know how not generating the locales could cause such a mess on that deep a level, but I'm just a noob who doesn't understand it all yet. I'm not sure if this thread is worth keeping around, as I'm unsure it could help other E595 users, so I'll let the mods decide that.

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#5 2020-01-22 17:39:48

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,739

Re: NVMe SSD in Lenovo Thinkpad E595 not detected after install

Closing and banning the duplicate account.  Contact me by email to discus recovering your account.


Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
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