Arch Linux

43615

Member

Registered: 2022-01-19

Posts: 51

HP laptop: eMMC storage not recognized by kernel

I'm helping a friend to set up Arch on a cheap HP laptop with eMMC storage. The installation went perfectly fine, there are no issues with the partitions, filesystem, or bootloader (went with systemd-boot). The system is accessible using chroot, and I can't find any other issues.

The problem is that during boot, the eMMC drive seems to disappear. The initrd loads and runs udev, but then the kernel can't find+mount the partition with the specified UUID and drops into the emergency shell. Running `blkid` only shows the archiso installation medium, as if the main drive isn't even there.

I have found some discussions of similar issues where users have claimed that the firmware of some laptops with flash storage is locked down to only allow a Windows kernel to access the drive. Can anyone confirm or deny that? Please suggest any solutions you can think of.