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May 17th, 2025 20:51
16 Area-51 AA16250, dual booting Ubuntu
Hello all! I recently purchased an Alienware Area 51 16 with a 2 TB hard drive. I am trying to install <Not supported by Dell. DELL-Admin> Linux on my hard drive to dual-boot into Ubuntu when needed. On my MSI computer all I had to do was turn off SecureBoot and install Linux and everything was a go. I can get the Linux system to run in the graphical install, but when it gets to where to install the OS on my SSD, it never finds the partition that I shrunk from my 2TB SSD. It doesn't see anything whatsoever. What am I missing? Any help, suggestions, or advice would be greatly appreciated.
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ejn63
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28.6K Posts
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May 17th, 2025 21:00
The drive is likely running in Intel RST (RAID) mode - meaning you'll need a driver for whatever distribution of Linux you want to run. Not all distributions support IRST, so your best course of action is to consult the support community for whatever version of Linux you plan to use.
RumarNite
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May 17th, 2025 21:05
I just noticed this as I was going into the BIOS. Thank you for your reply. You have been a major help. I will research on the community and see if there is anything I can find.
GraemeWilly
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June 4th, 2025 04:23
Same problem here. I can't get any Linux distro or cloning software to recognize any of my internal drives. I have 3 of them installed. Dell in their infinite wisdom made RST mode permanent. There's no way to turn it off.
GraemeWilly
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June 4th, 2025 11:48
Other things noticed with this PC:
1. Not only do any of the distributions not see the drives, but also imaging software, such as Acronis, Clonezilla...in Linux install environments fdisk -l only lists my USB drive that the distro is situated on.
2. I have no "AHCI mode" listed in BIOS under storage, where it would be for any other Dell PC.
3. When I go into Device Settings on the F12 (boot) menu, if I go into Intel Rapid Storage, all three drives are listed under "non-Raid configured drives," which tells me that none of my disks are currently setup with RAID at the moment.
4. Even should I disable all of the SED options, including the BlockSID, I still can't find my drives.
Secure Boot is already disabled, as part of a routine I always do for Linux.
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GraemeWilly
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June 10th, 2025 20:54
As an update to this. Apparently there is an advanced mode in del bios I was not aware of. I've worked with many PCs that used this exact same Dell BIOS and have never once had to toggle advance mode to get to the normal set of options.
That said? Pop OS still won't install, even in AHCI mode with secure boot off. Not sure what's happening there. With Ubuntu installed, I can't get Nvidia settings to recognize my 5090. I have blacklisted Noveau drivers and purged all Nvidia drivers on the system and reinstalled with the proprietary drivers from the Nvidia Settings still don't show my GPU, nor an of the settings. I'm also not running in Wayland mode. I also disabled hybrid graphics in BIOS and I still can't get Nvidia Settings to recognize my graphics card and nvidia-smi also is not working. I think it might have to do with the 570 proprietary drivers.
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username 2
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June 30th, 2025 22:31
I got the area-51 as an rtx 5090 compute server and here are my bios notes
1) to get ubuntu to install, change operation mode from irst to ahci.
wanted dual boot, but windows requires irst and ubuntu requires ahci.
2) to get programmable (cuda) drivers for the rtx 5090, turn off secure boot.
wanted to use secure boot, but couldn't write programs for the card otherwise.
These changes are not a problem for us, but hope Dell will fix them for others.
gfx13
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July 5th, 2025 03:46
@username 2 How to that? Previously I had 13r3. I had ubuntu 22 and 20 flash bootable using them to boot. Now I am stuck. I don't know how to boot with my Ubuntu bootable flash? Any ideas?
username 2
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July 5th, 2025 20:05
@gfx13 It took me 3 days to install ubuntu, due to trial and error. I looked at many websites, some of which were out of date. Two things come to mind about the bios settings. Make sure that the ubuntu drive has higher priority than any other drive. Make sure the ubuntu drive uses ahci rather than irst. But, there are many things that could go wrong and you may need to explore.