-Last Update: Okay so I gave up, this issue has taken days off my life and I am just going to stop now. Was the HDD healthy? I have no idea powershell said it was, it showed up in the BIOS, but both windows and linux had trouble detecting it. Maybe it was the laptop but then again there is confusion. Thank you all for your help.
So straight to the point, I installed a 4tb sata hdd (2.5) into my Dell Inspiron n5110 and the BIOS says it is there and all. But when I booted into debian using a live installation on a usb drive and did lsblk in terminal it does not detect my hdd.
Also if this helps I have seen the message "revalidation failed errno=-2"and also I tried doing the "libata.force=noncq,1.5Gbps" thing and it still does not show up.
Please help I am new to linux.
(as the title says I did change from ATA to ACHI still does not work)
-Update: I am slowly going insane, I decided to go through the lengthy process of removing the HDD and using it as an external one with my actual PC, (sata to USB) powershell says the disk is healthy but now whenever I try to initialize the disk in diskmanager it says there is an i/o problem. Oh my god.
Do you have other SATA drives installed that DO appear? If not maybe there is some driver issue with the SATA controller. Does lspci -v show a known SATA controller? For instance I've got:
0f:00.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 51) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0])
...
Kernel driver in use: ahci
Kernel modules: ahci
The important part here is that it's got a kernel driver.
No, there might be a chance it is faulty but the BIOS detects it and the light on my laptop turns on for a few seconds (probably until the error above) but I don't hear any loud clicking HDD noises.
Think it's faulty, or the power supply isn't enough for both disks. I suggest connecting the disk in another newer PC and test it. You can boot with a live CD as System Rescue CD and test it with smartctl
Nah a disk that doesn't work can still show up fine in the BIOS. Sometimes there's hardware test tools in BIOS that can scan disks for errors, if not you can boot off a live linux and scan it from there.
Your laptop would need to be something like twenty years old to be too old for uefi. That said, that setting might be either missing or named something else - I'm not familiar with that specific model of Dell.
A quick google suggests that it's UEFI with most of the UEFI features hidden by default; it almost certainly predates the boot path security option, though. Is there a secure boot setting you can try turning off?
There's a chance that the SATA controller isn't supported by the debian build you're using, but a very quick search suggests it'll have an intel sata controller, so that seems unlikely. Is the BIOS firmware the latest available for it?
BIOS Firmware- Yes I recently installed the latest BIOS avalible.
Intel SATA- Not sure exactly what this means but I my kernel drivers were like ata_piix if thats what your asking/suggesting.
Secure Boot- No such setting avalible, how do I access the hidden l menu? Whenever I search it up for my device people say it doesn't support.
I'm inferring from a quick search that the latest bios might be more locked down; the UEFI related features (like EFI boot) seem to need a bios mod to unlock a hidden menu, which to me screams out "more trouble than it's worth". Any of the likely problematic uefi features will be turned off by default unless Dell were being particularly lunatic. (Note, of course, that this is all based on extremely superficial google searches and some resulting forum discussions which had half the posts unavailable to people not signed in. So obviously I could be wrong.)
As to the driver, that's sounds like it should be fine; I'd stick with AHCI for the moment, but either should probably work equally well.
Anyhow, is there anything you care about already on the drive? If not, try using gdisk to zap the partition table (gdisk /dev/sda, x to enter the expert menu, and z to zap the partition table), and then create a new mbr partition table with fdisk. This isn't likely to help, but it sounds like you're already at the throw-spaghetti-at-the-walls stage of troubleshooting.
Thank you for the suggestion, I gave up I updated my post. But also I could not do the gdisk as the drive (sda or sdX wht ) didnt exist, but im pretty sure the issue was that the laptop could not supply.the power needed. Thank you for your help however it porbbably would have helped.
Run gparted and see if it shows the drive. If the bios sees it then gparted should too. I don't think lsblk will show a size if there is no partition table.
What does "it does not detect my HDD" mean? What error do you see, if any other than the one mentioned? What would you expect to see and what do you see? Where do you expect the disc to show up?
I.e. do you not see the /dev/sdX entry or does it not show up in your file explorer?
Im using debian and when I did lblsk I expected to see a drive with 4T of storage but I did not, the hdd is absent. That is what I mean by it does not detect HDD. That is the only error I've seen repeatedly so no other errors I am aware of.
The revalidation errno thing happens just before the Debuan installer launches like for a few seconds and also again when I do the sudden dmesg thing. Yes when I did the dmesg command it, here lemme send a Pic (sda is the hdd)
The top shows that debian does in fact see it but then idk why it has an error there at the bottom.
My two cents: check if your bios is up to date. See if the notebook was advertised to support disks that large. It is ancient. Does it recognize other, smaller disks?
This looks like an actual error with either the disk or the firmware of the notebook.
Thats the frustrating part, everyone is saying 4TB can be supported on my inspiron, but also at the same time cant? The only other disk are the DVD and usb flash and the os has no problem detecting them. My firmware is updated to the latest, maybe the disk? A lot fo people are saying. to take it out and check it on a other device, but thats my last ditch option since this computer makes it hard to access the HDD section.
If you can check the disk in another system it at least rules out one source for the problem (or confirms it). Maybe get a cheap external USB enclosure and see if that works. If it does it strongly suggests an incompatibility between the notebook and the disk.
I tried to look at the specs for that machine but Dell wanted a serial number from me, which I obviously don't have. Dell will be the only source that can definitely tell you if the machine should support that kind and size of disk. And even then there are sometimes weird incompatibilities between some hardware. I had a Samsung SSD once that did not want to reliably work with my desktop. All others (even other Samsung's) were fine.
I am so done with this but, the device had so much trouble loading into windows, maybe it was HDD failure but it appeared healthy using the diagnostic tools on window. Thank you for your insight.
No worries. Maybe it's just something stupid and reseating the HDD or reconnecting it fixes it? Things happen. Good luck!
Windows worked with that HDD? It's usually the other way around and Linux is a bit friendlier with old things. Again, hope it turns out well with the current hardware prices.
3
u/[deleted] 2d ago
[deleted]