0

This is the sister question: Legion Y530-15ICH doesn't detect wireless adapter .

After two days of running up the wall, I was able to boot this piece of junk. Unfortunately, it cannot detect HDD it's supposed to have. Tomorrow I'll call the retailer and, hopefully, they will be able to tell what HDD did they put inside: I don't want to open it, since that would void the warranty.

So, lsblk, parted, fdisk -- all of them are confident that the only persistent storage attached to this laptop is an SSD drive. Fortunately, I was able to boot from it, unfortunately, I actually would love to have HDD working as well.

The spec only gives me this:

1TB (7200RPM) Sata

Which is not a lot to go on...

Oh, and no matter the settings in BIOS, BIOS itself cannot see the HDD. I tried using UEFI shell to see what devices does it think are there, but I'm not familiar with the tool and don't know how to interpret the output (it sees dozens of "devices").

Any ideas what could I try to detect it? It's hard to believe it was dead on delivery, and even if that, isn't there at least some way to tell "hey, there's this dead body in your laptop that might have been an HDD"?

wvxvw
  • 358
  • Some systems have drives set for RAID or Intel SRT, they need to be AHCI. But if dual booting with Windows install the AHCI drivers first into Windows. UEFI will have at least two tabs on drives, one is settings & drives should be shown. Other is boot and then drive is only shown if bootable and if bootable, would be also in UEFI boot menu. – oldfred Feb 20 '19 at 23:09
  • @oldfred fair point, but it's set to AHCI, so, that's not my case. There's no Windows on that Laptop. It came with Free DOS, but I overwrote it with Linux. What exactly does "drive being bootalbe" mean? Back in the days, HDDs had some sort of jumper you could switch to prevent them from being something (i.e. for example to make them read-only), but that's probably not that, or is it? – wvxvw Feb 21 '19 at 06:34
  • New UEFI has setting to turn off drive. One or two users have accidentally turned off a drive. But if that is on, and UEFI/BIOS does not have drive in list of devices, no operating system will see drive. With UEFI, you have an ESP - efi system partition (FAT32) with boot files or in BIOS/CSM/Legacy mode boot loader in the MBR. UEFI will normally check both if Secure Boot is off. If Secure Boot on, it only checks ESP and files have to be signed. – oldfred Feb 21 '19 at 13:59
  • Some newer hybrid "hard" drives are a combination of SSD and HDD. If you've been able to boot Ubuntu, what size drive does Ubuntu show? Something small like 128G, or 1TB? Report back to @heynnema – heynnema Feb 21 '19 at 17:27
  • @heynnema It's the size of SDD from the spec: 256G. – wvxvw Feb 21 '19 at 18:30
  • The SSD may have been used as a cache for the HDD. I'll bet $0.99, that if you reinstall Free DOS it'll all work as expected. Do you have the reinstall disks that hopefully came with your computer? Report back. – heynnema Feb 21 '19 at 19:05
  • @heynnema nope, I don't have one. I think I could make one with Free DOS. But, even if it works there, it's of no use to me... I'm not going to use this laptop with Free DOS. And, yes, this is the gist of how Intel envisions people to use SSD + HDD (which is just marketing scam), luckily, at least allegedly, it should be possible to disable this nonsense in BIOS (which is what I did). Perhaps, though, the firmware has a bug, and it won't work properly in AHCI mode... – wvxvw Feb 23 '19 at 17:04
  • @wvxvw ah! Tell me what you changed in the BIOS. – heynnema Feb 23 '19 at 17:38
  • @heynnema basically, everything that had a trademark attached to it set to 'disabled'. I.e. Intel's pseudo-raid, thermal-platform-something... The BIOS had like five seytings all in all. Obviosly had to disable secure boot. Ah, there was slso something related to fingerprint scanner. Not even sure it's physically there. So that was also disabled. Turned on legacy boot support (w/o it no discs can be selected to boot from) – wvxvw Feb 24 '19 at 09:27
  • Did the "Intel's pseudo-raid" have a setting something like AHCI... or something other than disabled? – heynnema Feb 24 '19 at 13:29
  • @heynnema that's the opposite of RAID. My understanding is that AHCI should use a slower connection i.e. SATA, vs PCIe / NVMe. But I don't understand why do I have to choose a single setting for both discs. I.e. it would make sense to connect SSD using PCIe and to connect HDD using SATA... but, they didn't think it would be a good option. So, the BIOS is set to use AHCI. – wvxvw Feb 24 '19 at 14:18
  • I'm out of ideas. Sorry. – heynnema Feb 24 '19 at 14:30

2 Answers2

0

Oh, and no matter the settings in BIOS, BIOS itself cannot see the HDD.

Your disk is broken or disconnected.

Kristopher Ives
  • 5,509
  • The comment above suggests that the drive will only be detected by BIOS if it is bootable. So, maybe my saying "BIOS doesn't see it" is overstating it? – wvxvw Feb 21 '19 at 06:36
0

You can check in UEFI settings if you are in AHCI or RST mode for the hardrive. RST mode doesn't allow to install.

DRIFI Karim
  • 1
  • Hey, it's been a while, but, funny enough, this appeared to be a "hardware problem". Essentially, the shop sold me the laptop w/o an HDD, that's why I couldn't find it :D Thanks for the answer tho. – wvxvw Jul 20 '19 at 14:55