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I'm sure y'all are aware about this Intel RST thingy that prevents users from not installing Linux on their Intel Machines with SSDs.

In my particular case, I own an ASUS ROG Strix G17 (G712LU-H7015T) with an Intel Core i7-10750H 10th Gen, an nVidia GTX 1660Ti 6GB Graphics Card along side 16GB of DDR4RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD. And, obviously, running Windows 10. (And I recently got a Samsung 980 1TB SSD to increase my storage.)

Problem comes when I tried to install ubuntu on my laptop. The installer couldn't get past that "turn off RST" and < QR CODE > screen. I looked at so many forums and everyone either tells to turn off RST and switch to AHCI (which I fear of losing data) or to edit a bunch of registry keys (which I don't want to). I even went to the extent of trying to run a Live USB with ubuntu in it but I obviously can't have the same experience.

Can someone tell me a better workaround to this? Or is there a possibility that Intel officially lends support to linux? (or will there be a driver for RST/RAID drives from the open source community? just askin... lol)

(P.S: is there a way to install ubuntu on my Samsung 980 drive? or does it have RST too? My BIOS didn't notify me of that)

Pranav Rajendran
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This problem will probably be solved sooner or later. I will try to explain what causes the trouble.

Linux kernel properly supports RST mode. If you install Ubuntu to an empty computer with RST enabled in UEFI, the ahci kernel module shows [RST mode] and nothing bad happens.

Also you can configure a raid in Ubuntu and register it with RST too ;-)

But if there is Windows that makes some benefit of the RST raid features, it makes some trouble for grub. Windows can be configured a few different ways to use RST raid. At the moment there is no automatic way to detect it.

Sooner or later extra features should be added to grub and the problem will be fixed.

Now many vendors removed AHCI mode from UEFI settings, because many users switched it, couldn't boot Windows and complained. Some manuals you could find online say how to fix Windows registry to boot in AHCI mode, but this is not an option on many systems.

I am not a Windows expert, but I can suggest to re-install Windows in AHCI mode. Most likely there will be an option when you install the system. After Windows is installed without any raid, then there should be no problem to install Ubuntu.

In addition a few words about RST itself. It is not a hardware raid. It is a UEFI extra feature that allows OS to tell UEFI what sort of raid it is using. So it doesn't give any performance boost. It is useful only for Windows boot loader.

So the problem is not RST itself, but Windows installed on some raid.

Pilot6
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    @sudodus I didn't do any research. I made a few installations in RST mode. There shouldn't be any performance difference, because RST can work in AHCI mode too ;-) That is confusing a bit, but that's what really happens. It is possible to use RST and configure a raid with Ubuntu, but it will require some manual settings too. And probably even dual boot is possible with Windows raid if we know what sort of raid is there. – Pilot6 Oct 16 '21 at 21:32
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    I see no benefit in using RST for Ubuntu. You can setup all sorts of raids without using it. – Pilot6 Oct 16 '21 at 21:34
  • See both of my answers in the links that @oldfred supplied above. – heynnema Oct 16 '21 at 22:54
  • @heynnema The problem is that in many cases you can't switch it in BIOS. – Pilot6 Oct 17 '21 at 08:53
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The bottom line is that if you have an HP or other system that hides the RST, NVME, raid, ACHI, and other modes for the storage devices, then you are not going to install Linux on that boxen. As noted earlier, someday, a fix will be available but, not today. The only remedy I know to get Linux up and running on a notebook is to buy one that doesn't have RST and the associated interfaces installed on it. There is no universal solution at this time.

Bill the Cat
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Didn't found a way to skip Intel RST block, because I wanted to install Ubuntu on non RST SSD. I had to install Ubuntu 19.04, because there is no Intel RST block in installer. After that I just updated it to last version.

Demens Deum
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