Installing Rocky 8.6 on a NVMe 3.0 located on adapter card with a Twist: HELP

Rocky Linux General
1

It has gotten BORING :rofl: in this forum. Here is something to put some “Spice” back into this forum. Could use some HELP:

Here is the problem: My buddy has a computer that has an ASUS M5A97 R2.0 motherboard. The mother board has NO place to install an NVMe SSD. There are at least 2-3 slots that will take a PCIe “card”.

  1. Solution: Go out and get a PCIe card that will add NVMe capability to a motherboard that has no NVMe adapters natively on the Motherboard.

  2. That sounded like a “Brilliant” Solution . Indeed my buddy downloaded RL 8.6 onto a Thumb Drive. The BIOS saw the Thumb Drive. The BIOS did NOT see the the NVMe drive. Oh well, by buddy started up GParted, and went to see what GParted saw. GParted saw ALL the drives including the NVMe drive identified as /dev/nvme0n1. Just to be sure that the drive existed, by buddy ran fdisk -l. fdisk -l listed ALL the drives available, including /dev/nvme0n1.

  3. Convinced that there was NO PROBLEM my buddy INSTALLED RL 8.6 (on the Thumb Drive) to /dev/nvme0n1. The Install went flawlessly.

  4. Problem: We now have a PCIe card that gives NVMe capabilities to motherboards that do not have NVMe natively. We also have a NVMe 3.0 VNMe SSD that has Rocky Linux Installed successfully from the Thumb Drive that the BIOS saw.

  5. When my buddy went to BOOT RL 8.6 it did NOT BOOT!! When he went back to the BIOS we were sure that the drive would show up under BOOT => BOOT OVERRIDE: It DID NOT!!

7: When my buddy started up CentOS 7.9 and he typed “fdisk -L” CentOS 7.9 IMMEDIATELY found RL 8.6 on /dev/nvme0n1. Likewise when he started GParted, GParted immediately found /dev/nvmeon1.

  1. Back to BIOS we went. Boot => Boot Override still did NOT FIND the drive that CentOS 7.9 (and for that matter Fedora 29, 30, 31 found). A SEARCH of all the entire BIOS failed to identify anything that had to do with NVMe SSD’s – probably because the motherboard was manufactured prior to the development of NVMe SSD’s or the M2 SSD standard that is now found on every motherboard. Indeed the motherboard has no problem booting from esoteric devices beyond the ubiquitous CDROM / DVD Drive, but also a) Thumb Drives b) EXTERNAL HHD’s c) EXTERNAL SSD’s and other devices that have a bootable LINUX OS on it. The ONLY thing it seems it can NOT BOOT from is the NVMe SSD that is mounted on an adptor drive. I suspect that any media that utilizes an M2 slot would likely FAIL be it an SSD drive or an NVMe SSD drive.

  2. There were no “drivers” that came with the M2 adapter card that plugs into an open PCIe slot.

I am sure there are forum members who have gone down this road before. How did you solve this PROBLEM? DID you SOLVE this problem??

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I suspect that since the ASUS M5A97 R2.0 motherboard does not support the M2 format natively, yet CentOS 7.9 (and Fedora from Fedora 29 and on), and other RHEL distros have no problem finding the device (fdisk -l) or finding and modifying the drive (via GParted), that a POSSIBLE SOLUTION :thinking: :thinking: may be to modify the GRUB2 menu. Either going the route of *30_os-prober, which would allow CentOS 7.9 to go out and find any other bootable drives; or, failing that, going into *40_custom and creating a CUSTOM grub2 menu.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

D’Cat