SSD drive not seen and partitioning advise

[orbanp]

Hello Everyone,

Recently got a new PC, the old one with Kubuntu 18.04 and WXP died (the video card) and the replacement video card from eBay took forever to arrive.

The new PC is an Acer Veriton X6660G desktop with 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, W10 Home preinstalled, and UEFI BIOS mode.
The processor is the Intel Core i5-8500 6-core 3GHz CPU.
The video system is the integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics system.
Since then I added a 1TB 7200 RPM WD HD that I had around.
I would like to install 20.04 too and make the system dual boot.

I created a 20.04 liveCD (DVD) and booted up the PC from there to try 20.04.
Looking at the drives, the SSD just does not show up, neither under KDE Partition Manager, nor with the lsblk console command!
The rotational HD is there, and showing the 250GB NTFS partition that was on it.
Any reason the SSD can not be seen?
The PC and the drives work fine under W10, the disk management shows both drives.

Now about partitioning.
Assuming I can "find" the SSD drive under Linux, I would like to shrink the W10 NTFS partition on the SSD drive to about 200GB, make the remaining (nominal) 56GB the root partition for 20.04, and then make the swap and home partition on the rotational HD.
Any comment or advise on this?

EDIT:
Just have seen the similar post about a not seen SSD drive and the advise about changing the SATA mode in the BIOS to "achi" from "RST".
Well, that one did not work for me!
W10 could not find the drive, the system did not boot up!
Changing back to "RST" mode the system went into "self repair" and after another reboot finally got itself together.

Thanks for the help, Peter

[claydoh]

From yesterday

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post443487

If your system's bios uses Intel's RST for the SSD instead of 'achi', Linux can't see the drive.



As to partitioning, sure, that can be done.
if you want to save a step, *buntu defaults to a swap file instead of a separate partition, which is fine for most people, but you can definitely create a partition, and it will be used instead of a file if one is assigned in the installer's manual partitioning section.

[orbanp]

Hi claydoh,

Thanks for the advise!
I did manage to enable the 'achi' mode as described here:
https://www.techcrises.com/how-to/enable-ahci-mode/
Now I can see both drives.

Thanks, Peter

[jlittle]

... I would like to shrink the W10 NTFS partition on the SSD drive to about 200GB...

I was just doing this today.

One can use "disk management" in Windows (right-click This PC, Manage) to shrink Windows. I've seen advice here in KFN that it's better to use that, but some say using gparted is fine. Anyway, if you use the Windows facility, you may run into the shrink being limited due to "unmoveable files".

I followed this to get around it: how can I shrink a windows 10 partition. After turning off hibernation, the page file, and "system protection", it still wouldn't shrink as much as I wanted, and I had to follow a later post in that thread to find the culprit; run a defrag, then look in the event viewer, application log, and look for a "defrag" event "259" In the details it identifies the last unmoveable file. It was the anti-malware thingy, and after disabling that, and a restart, I could shrink enough. Then, re-enable the anti-malware, system protection, page file, and hibernation, and restart. Windows loves its restarts.