Install CD doesn't recognise SSD

Tae_kyon · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 71

I just bought a Lenovo laptop with no OS, it has 2 hard disks: a 1Tb one which is recognised as /dev/sda and a 128Gb SSD.
Both are visible from the boot options.

However, if I boot from the minimal installation Gentoo image on a USB drive, I see:

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 3:54 pm Post subject:

A SATA SSD should be recognized. Is it an NVME? Then you need to add support to the kernel.

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 3:55 pm Post subject:

SSD is sata or nvme? If nvme try to check /dev/nvme*
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Tae_kyon · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 71

Ok, I see the SSD as:

/dev/nvme0n1

:roll:

Wasn't aware of these newfangled naming schemes for SSD's.

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Banana · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 3:58 pm Post subject:

Hello Tae_kyon.

Are you sure /dev/sdb is your SSD and not your USB stick?

If the boot medium has the lshw command https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-apps/lshw you can use to to identify the disks with

Jaglover · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 4:02 pm Post subject: Re: Solved!

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 4:23 pm Post subject:

Drives used to be /dev/hdX. I suppose that stood for Hard Drive
I suppose /dev/sdX stands for Sata Drive. I had a mixed system with IDE and SATA and it named one /dev/sda and the other /dev/hda IIRC. That machine has Win 7 on it now. I should boot a Gentoo DVD and see what they are named now. Just for curiosity.

EDIT: You might be able to use a udev rule to rename the NVME drive but I'm not sure that's a good idea.
A better idea is to assign labels to the partitions, and just refer to them by label, i.e. in /etc/fstab and in your boot command. Then, no matter how the kernel assigns the /dev, you will be addressing the correct drive and partition.

Jaglover · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 4:29 pm Post subject:

It was IDE driver which named devices hda, SCSI driver named drives sda, it was even before SATA was invented.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 5:09 pm Post subject:

Tony0945,

A long time ago, before the PC had hard drives ... before the IBM PC even there were real eight bit parallel SCSI drives.
They were expensive and not easy to interface to early PCs. DMA was not an optional extra with real SCSI.

Then Seagate invented the ST506.
That started the race to simplify the interface.

Next up was Compaqs Integrated Drive Electronics, better knows an IDE.
The motherboard interface was trivial. It was a cut down 16 bit ISA slot with a different connector.
Like all engineers, the designers were lazy and built on what was already documented.
The IDE interface used a subset of the SCSI command set. Essentially, all the hard bits were left out, like overlapping commands, DMA etc, which were added back in over the years as 'speed ups' and 'improvements'.

At the outset, LInux implemented IDE as /dev/hdX, where X was interface count dependent.
When libata came along, The IDE drives moved under libata and were merged back into their SCSI heritage.
I think I switched over about kernel 2.6.26.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 5:31 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 5:38 pm Post subject:

Tony0945,

Real live parallel SCSI electrical interfaces are dead but the protocol is alive and well.
Almost all block devices, no matter the electrical interface, use the SCSI protocol.
UAS even :) UAS USB Attached SCSI.

I'm an engineer too :)
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.