So Junior #2, the theoretical physicist, has a need for a Linux laptop for his work, with Ubuntu on it.
Fine. Mrs F has an old Dell XPS which can be re-purposed.
An ISO is downloaded, and Rufus is used to make a bootable USB stick. This all works as expected.
The installer gets so far, then fails to find a hard drive to install on.
This is slightly complicated by the fact the laptop has 2 drives: a smaller SSD, and a bigger HDD.
As usual, google will produce lots of hits, and as usual for Linux installs, they are all wrong or out of date.
Three things needed fixing:
-Go into BIOS and set the SATA controllers to AHCI not RAID - Google found this just fine.
-Add boot parameters to GRUB for 'nvme_load=yes' - where this goes is well at odds with any of the instructions.
Even then, the installer could not see the drives.
But it did come up in 'Live' mode directly off the USB stick.
Within the Live mode session, tools like gparted could see the disks just fine.
They did not have a normal partition table, and were showing as having a raid structure on them.
I set up a normal partition structure on the drives (just an empty partition table, all space unallocated), and on re-booting then they showed up in the installer.
I'm a little irritated the installer did not show the drives just as bare metal and allow me to partition as required.
It got all squeamish about the old raid ones and zeros on the platters.
Screw that! I want to obliterate the ones and zeros.
Just show me the bare metal drives! Ignore what's currently on it!