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vsido

- vsido
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## Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sat Oct 15, 2016 10:55 pm

I have a VSIDO user with a laptop and the Samsung 950 pro drives also know as M.2 drives
His /dev naming conventions are nvme0n1p1 nvme0n1p2 nvme0n1p3 nvme0n1p4 nvme0n1p10 nvme0n1p11
The installer does not see these drives at all so nothing can be installed
gparted sees them fine
Is this something that has come up here at all or is there a known work around?
Thanks!
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 16, 2016 3:03 am

This is the first time I've seen that. Which installer is he using, and what is he trying to install?
I included a separate script in the latest amd64 refracta iso for installing to uefi hardware. It's only the gui installer. The cli installer will probably accept those names, because whatever you type in becomes a variable, so entering /dev/nvme0n1p1 should work, as long as it's a block device. And as long as your user doesn't mind experimenting. Run it in debug mode, please.
HOWEVER, the cli installer is not set up for uefi installs. You must not let it install the bootloader!
It does pause at a good time to do stuff manually, including chroot into the installed system.. If you know how to manually install a uefi bootloader, this would be the time to do it. Or just boot it from another installed linux if available.
Let me know more.
vsido

- vsido
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 16, 2016 3:18 am

He is installing VSIDO from a live-cd created with the 10.0 version of the refracta snapshot tool that has the latest 9.1.9 refracta installer (yad installer, not cli)
I set this up as a test ISO just to get some traction and feedback on EFI capabilities
Thanks
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 16, 2016 11:58 am

Getting the graphical installer to handle this isn't going to be as easy as getting the cli installer to handle uefi. I'll have to experiment with new ways to find the available drives. Right now, the script uses the find command and filters for [hs]d[a-z][1-9]* and you need it to filter nvme-something. nvme0n1p[1-9]*
Assuming that only the p1, p2... part is what changes, then replacing that pattern might work. But there are some other changes that need to be made in the graphical installer. As mentioned above, I made a separate script for uefi installations. It has some safety features and makes the installation easier by doing some things for you, such as mounting the efi partition at /boot/efi and adding a line for that to fstab. Later on, I can probably post a copy of that with the replaced pattern.
Meanwhile, if you haven't already done it (and maybe even if you have) read this:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/
And it may be useful to use the cli installer and do it manually a few times. That's what I did when I first started testing uefi installation. Make sure you know how to hose the system so you don't do it.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 16, 2016 3:30 pm

I posted two versions of the current uefi installer and instructions here -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/files/experimental/
The one for nvme is hard-coded to only look for nvme0n1 so if there's more than one m2 drive, it won't know about the second one. If that's the case, I need to know how it's numbered. Come to think of it, I should know that anyway, because it will eventually be needed for a proper installer. And this one will only work with uefi.
Please run it with the -d option.
The other, -uefi installer is for drives labeled /dev/sdX.
If you want the uefi help to be available from within the program (in one of the first windows) keep it in your current directory or adjust the path to the file in line 2 of the script.
vsido

- vsido
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 16, 2016 11:21 pm

Great work and feedback fsmithred...
The nvme version worked perfectly for the user.. he will respond later with any questions about nvme device naming conventions..
It sucks for me as I do not have any EFI hardware to test on and have to do most everything as a middleman
I really appreciate your help and work
jedi

- jedi
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 23, 2016 3:12 am

fsmithred, huge thanks!
I wish I could authoritatively say what the naming scheme ends up being when more than one of the pcie slots is filled with an m.2 drive. My laptop has 4 available slots. My drive (Samsung 950 Pro) ends up being named nvme0n1 It is a 512 Gb drive... It is in slot 0 on the main board. Obviously, 3 slots free/empty. My educated 'guess' would be that the numbers correspondingly then progress according to slots utilized on the main board. i.e. another identical drive to mine inserted into slot 2 on the main board would end up being nvme2n1. The 'p' designator is obviously 'partition'. I've had as many as 13 partitions and this naming scheme, nvme0n1p13, has never changed.
Once I begin partitioning it that changes to nvme0n1p1, nvme0n1p2, etc.
Further relevant mentions, I have UEFI enabled in BIOS, and Legacy disabled basically, as well as Secure Boot disabled. nvme0n1p1 is formatted vfat, is 1 Gb, boot flag set, ESP set.
nvme0n1p2 is a swap partition, 8 Gb's.
nvme0n1p3 is where / is installed to and is formatted ext4.
nvme0n1p4 is where /home is installed to and also ext4.
I do currently have a Manjaro install on partions nvme0n1p10 and nvme0n1p11. It is also a UEFI enabled and running up to date distro.
More than happy to help in any way I can. Your installer allows me to run my favorite distro! VastOne created it, VSIDO.
Again, HUGE thank-you for this!
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Oct 23, 2016 4:20 am

You're welcome, and thanks for the feedback. I will need some help when I get to integrating the changes I made for nvme into a unified installer. All I did was replace a search pattern, so that instead of looking for sd[a-z][1-9] it looked for nvme0n1p[1-9]. I'm guessing that one of the digits is for additional drives connected to the same pcie and the other one is for additional pcie cards.
Once I decide how I'm going to do it, I'd like to make some sample scripts that make the drive and partition selection windows come up. Just to make sure everything that 's there shows up. You won't need to install again. I can fake it by making it look for my sd/mmc card, but it helps to do it with the real thing.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Sun Nov 13, 2016 6:56 pm

Here's a test script:
https://gist.github.com/fsmithred/441e7 ... 116f1e2802
You can run it as normal user. All it does is ask you what drive or partition to use for grub, OS installation and optionally first hard drive and efi partition. It should echo the selected devices to the terminal. Please test it to make sure it shows all drives and partitions correctly. I made it so that it will detect normal hard drives (hda or sda), nvme drives and sd/mmc drives. I'm not sure if the last one is useful other than for me to test it here.
Thanks. If this works, the actual installer is already written and just needs to be packaged.
vsido

- vsido
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- Joined: Fri Jan 30, 2015 3:38 pm

## Re: Refracta EFI and NVMe Samsung 950 pro drives

Fri Dec 30, 2016 9:58 pm

I am sorry fsmithred, I have just now seen this last post from you.. I will ask jedi to test this after I build an ISO with it
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