(Dell Optiplex 3070 mini) Edit: Successfully installed thanks to all of you! In this specific case all I had to do was change from RAID to ACHI which I was able to do in the bios settings themselves. A warning to anyone who might do this if you want to keep windows I believe you have to edit the windows registry somehow but I did not care to keep windows at all so simply changing boot order to boot the USB with Debian installer first and then change from RAID to ACHI and boom, the windows partition will be discoverable.
Original post: What am I doing wrong here? The computer has Windows 11 on it but I don’t want to use it I want it all the way off the machine.
Can this installer not overwrite the Windows OS with Debian? Edit: Just want to say thanks to all of you I’m going to experiment around with the advice you all have given and see how it works out! Absolutely love the passion and helpfulness of this community here on Lemmy for real!
You delete the Windows partition and then select the default Debian. Select custom in the install menu and then delete all the partitions
This sounds like you are struggling with the installer UI. Everyone here seems to think it is a software bug or firmware problem. I suspect you are just new to the installer. It isn’t exactly the most user friendly.
So installer is not recognizing your hard disk. There are plenty of potential causes but One thing to check is bios configuration of the disk drive, is the drive configured as raid? I’ve run into that a couple of times recently.
@Johnny5 This was it! Changed to ACHI and no problems after that thank you so much!!
I had this issue. A laptop with a single ssd was configured as raid 0 in bios out of the box. Changed it – debian immediately recognizes the drive.
Make sure windows was shut down all the way. Normally when you shutdown windows, it only hibernates and it locks it’s partitions to prevent editing. I tried installing Zorin for a family member recently, and it couldn’t install until I booted back into windows and shut it down fully.
To shutdown fully, in windows you need to either hold shift while clicking the shutdown button, or open the run box and run the command shutdown -s -t 00
Locks as far as windows will not be happy that you changed them. If you’re getting rid of windows don’t worry about shutting down safely.
No, I straight up had two different installation media’s fail until I went back and shut down windows fully. I’ve never run into that before on an install before.
First I tried ZorinOS, and it would fail to even boot into the live environment. I tried multiple times and even made a new install media. Then I tried fedora silverblue, it would get into the install environment but couldn’t do any kind of partitioning etc to the drive. I then rebooted to windows, shut it down fully, and tried again. This time fedora could edit the drive partitions, and zorin could load the live environment and install.
Previously I’ve had issues with shared drives being locked by windows, but this was the first time I’ve ever had an install fail because windows wasn’t shutdown fully. I don’t usually dual boot these days either though (I was setting up this computer for family) so I figured maybe something had changed with newer versions of windows or device security.
Push ctrl-alt-3 or 2 or something till you get a terminal. Run the command ls /dev/sd*
Post what it says back to you.
E: if you don’t see two drives, do ls /dev/nvm*
@bloodfart I figured out what it was thanks to all of you! It was just that I had to change from RAID to ACHI in the bios! Since I didn’t want to keep windows I didn’t even have to open a command prompt or anything.
Man I love this whole community I can’t thank all of you enough.
I always forget what subset of bins come on the livecd, does it do lsblk?
Really just a guess but since others have pointed to bios raid stuff this may be relevant:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SataRaid
But also you probably want to disable raid in bios if it’s enabled.
