Installing Fedora 33 on my new Dell laptop
by andymck from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5F49R)
As the title says, I recently bought a new Dell laptop, planning to install Fedora 33 on it. As soon as I finished setting up Windows on it, I downloaded the Fed33 network installation, put it on a USB stick, and booted it. It said there wasn't a drive to install on, so I aborted the install, went back to Windows, and shrank down the C: drive enough to free up some 380G or so.
But when I restarted the Fed33 installation, it still said there wasn't a drive to install on -- not "not enough room," but NO drive; the install destination window showed no drives at all.
To cut to the chase, I scrambled for "Why?" and found a post saying that, to do his installation, the poster had had to convert his RAID drive to AHCI. I checked and, sure enough, my new Dell had the drive formatted as RAID. I went back to Windows, created a re-installation USB stick, and converted the hard drive to AHCI (which destroyed the Windows installation). After re-building Windows, I tried the Fed33 install again, and this time it went fine.
So, no problem to solve, right? Well, I do have a few questions.
* Was doing the RAID to AHCI reformat the only way to do my Fed33 installation?
* If not, what else should (or could) I have done?
* If Fedora 33 really won't install on a RAID drive, are there any plans to change that? How about adding a note to the documentation that is part of the installation ISO?
But when I restarted the Fed33 installation, it still said there wasn't a drive to install on -- not "not enough room," but NO drive; the install destination window showed no drives at all.
To cut to the chase, I scrambled for "Why?" and found a post saying that, to do his installation, the poster had had to convert his RAID drive to AHCI. I checked and, sure enough, my new Dell had the drive formatted as RAID. I went back to Windows, created a re-installation USB stick, and converted the hard drive to AHCI (which destroyed the Windows installation). After re-building Windows, I tried the Fed33 install again, and this time it went fine.
So, no problem to solve, right? Well, I do have a few questions.
* Was doing the RAID to AHCI reformat the only way to do my Fed33 installation?
* If not, what else should (or could) I have done?
* If Fedora 33 really won't install on a RAID drive, are there any plans to change that? How about adding a note to the documentation that is part of the installation ISO?