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I've recently bought a new Lenovo IdeaPad C340 with an M.2 SSD and Windows 10 preinstalled. Now I want to dual-boot it with Manjaro (Awesome WM edition, shouldn't matter through).

The problem: Neither the installer on the live USB, nor Gparted, nor even ls /dev does detect the SSD.

After some research I discovered that my SSD is operating with Intel RST. In order to switch to AHCI, I followed this instruction. It worked fine, but the Laptop feeled so dramaticaly slower after that, even after several reboot, I didn't even need a benchmark to tell there's something wrong with the SSD. The start time went from under 5sec to ~30sec. Futhermore, I was unable to turn the laptop off / reboot it, as the power light just continues to glow (for a long time) even when the screen went dark. Further searching revealed that this is a common problem when switching to AHCI, and the only option is to reinstall Windows. Great.

Afterwards I switched back to Intel RST (using same instructions), and now try to get the Manjaro Live USB to detect the said SSD, with no luck so far. When I look at the RST options in the UEFI, the SSD is a non-RAID PCIe NVM SSD. (Of course, I only have one drive, why the hell is that thing set to RST in the first place?)

There are many tutorial / references / information out there describing how to make a RAID0 or RAID1 with RST, or how to accompish what I want by switching to AHCI. But I don't need this. I just want Manjaro to detect this SSD.

Is there any way to accomplish this by for example configuring it with mdadm? Or is there any way one can fix that Windows issues without nuking and reinstalling it?

Note: USB-Boot is enabled, Secure Boot and Legacy Support disabled. Futhermore, /dev/mapping/control is present, but no further devices are in /dev/mapping and there are no /dev/dm-* devices neither. And I'm not 100% sure if the problem is really with RST.

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  • ...why the hell is that thing set to RST in the first place? The IdeaPad C340 is not Linux-certified, so Some Genius at Lenovo decided they wanted the system to run as fast as possible, without considering someone might want to put Linux on it.
    – K7AAY
    Dec 26, 2019 at 16:36
  • If you can get your laptop back to normal, install VMware Workstation (or Hyper-V) and install the Linux system as a guest. I have done that here with Kali and with Ubuntu both
    – John
    Dec 26, 2019 at 18:27
  • John, I will probably do some stuff which requires native performance, so virtualisation is not an option. Also, I do not want to rely on Windows beeing kind to me and working all the time.
    – nickkoro
    Dec 29, 2019 at 14:52

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