Z800 not seeing SATA storage

[hypersonocs]

Hi All,

I picked up an HP z800 workstation about 3 years back for having a small home lab and was running RHEL 8.x quite successfully. However, had switched it off and repurposed the SSDs (Samsung EVO 860 1TB and an Intel 256GB) for other things.

In the last two days, I have been trying to revitalize z800 again by installing Fedora 35/RHEL 8.x/RHEL 7.x. However, now none of the Live USBs are able to detect the storage during OS installation. I have tried just the Samsung and or Intel and both don't seem to get recognized. The BIOS successfully detects both the SSDs. In the Z800, I have tried setting SATA emulation to either RAID+AHCI or IDE, but no luck!

I don't know what has gone wrong. These were the same two SSDs that I had used successfully on the same z800.

Any help would be appreciated! Many thanks

[hypersonocs]

Found the fix myself.

For those who are installing Linux, make sure your SSD does not have a logical partition (LVM) on it as the anaconda installer doesn't see it. To fix, boot of a live Fedora or something, open a terminal as root and use fdisk or parted to remove LVM and rescan the disk. The installer should then be able to regognise.