Trouble installing on laptops with M.2 drives

1

HP 17-by1053dx: M.2 failure

One of my clients purchased 23 of these HP laptops.
One of them died within 2 hours of booting and setting up.
Within the week about half did.
They called me and I checked them out - they did not die. All had the boot error. After doing all the things HP wanted they (the client) said, wipe out W10 and put Ubuntu on like the rest. I couldnt install
on any of the computer. All these laptops have the M.2 hard drives. Ive not had any real experience
with them so my question is, is there something about using the M.2 drives that is different? Ideas on why so many would be failing?

2

I do not have any experience with M2, but I do believe the Linux installer will not recognize M2 as a /dev
I did find this article that may help https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln299303/loading-ubuntu-on-systems-using-pcie-m2-drives?lang=en, hope this may help.

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3

Im going to have to look into this carefully because Ive had yet other of those HP’s have boot problems. Im thinking they send them all back (Im not a HP fan) and get something I know works.

4

I cannot really give an experienced answer, but I use a MintBox mini which has a M.2 drive and came with Linux Mint pre installed.
I installed Mint 20 from scratch (just because I wanted to see how it goes) and it went OK. No special needs that I remember. But maybe this machine is just different from your situation.

5

I sat down with a few people I found who had more M2 exp than I do and they were a bit baffled. The company returned all the laptops yesterday. They are shipped out this morning. Every single one has failed now.

6

I once had a Dell netbook with 32G of storage on the mother board. I had no luck getting any Linux distro noticing this substitute for a hard drive, so dumping Windows or dual-booting was impossible. The problems with M2 drives might be a newer iteration of this lack of awareness.

7

I never posted back on this but all the laptops with M2 from HP were returned. The client got their money back. They purchased ThinkPads with M2 and all are running Kubuntu 20.04 without problems. Ive not had any problems with the OS - only the hardware itself. But this was specific to that purchase of units.

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8

I recently bought a HP ZBook with an M.2 drive. First job was to remove Windows and install Linux Mint 20. After some troubles with the installation using the Mint 20 procedure I finally managed it after using Gparted to wipe the drive completely, make a new partition, then use the Mint 20 installation disk. One other problem may centre around the disk being MBR instead of GPT. Mine is currently GPT on a Sandisk 256GB M.2 drive.
‘sudo parted -l’ gives you your drive details. Hope this helps.

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