I hope someone can help me out. My problem is that I can’t deactivate Intel RST in my BIOS, so my NVMe SSD is unavaillable to Linux. There is no obvious way to get around this issue as far as I know. I already tried disabling AHCI, but that just deactivated the SSD, weird I know. I saw someone having the same issue and he was able to mod his BIOS and flash it with a BIOS programmer. But wouldn’t it suffice to use setup_var?
I used it to change the DVMT Pre-Alloc on my Latitude 5590. Maybe someone can help me? I already dumped the BIOS with fpt and extracted the IFRs or whatever it’s called.
@modzilla : Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum! Although I am not an expert regarding your problem, I would like to know the sense of your request. What means "Disabling Intel RST"? As the name says, The Intel Rapid Storage Technology is a technology and no on-board device. Do you want to disable the RAID function of the Intel SATA Controller or the "Intel RAID Utility", which is able to create or delete an Intel RAID array? And what has the "Intel RST" to do with the functionality of an NVMe SSD, which is M.2 or PCIe connected? Regards Dieter (alias Fernando)
As I understand it Intel RST (or Optane) remappes the ssd to some weird proprietary AHCI implementation so that the Intel driver take over the device. They say it is more efficient than the official windows driver for NVMe SSDs. That’s at least what I read. Normally it’s used to create RAID arrays as you said. But because that’s not the case here, I have no option to disable it in the driver as well as the BIOS. It is all really confusing because Dell normally even claims that the NVMe works in AHCI mode. But I can’t find an option to enable it. I hope that clears up the confusion a little.
The manual for the Latitude 5590 states that you’d be able to chose between AHCI and Raid (default)? Switching back to AHCIs at least the solution proposed several places (Linux Mint, Ubuntu/ IntelOptane, Dualboot Ubuntu with Intel Optane/SSD in Windows). You’d possibly have to disable Optane in the Intel RST software first, and maybe activate the AHCI driver in Windows to avoid data loss. In the last link (youtube) it seems to be possible to re-enable Raid mode/ Optane after installing Linux onto a normal hard disk. The Optane-SSD is still not initialized/ used as Optane disk. But I’m not sure when the content on the optane disk get’s erased, and what’s going to happen if Windows does find this disk initialized…
Sorry for the confusion! We’re talking about my Dell Inspiron 7490 and there is no way to deactivate in the BIOS. There is an option to deactivate the whole SATA-Controller or enable RAID-Mode. And no there is no option to disable it in the application unfortuantely as it’s just remapping the drive and not running any kind of raid.
@Fernando would there a way to change the RST configuration via a UEFI utility ?
For the X35G BIOS, the MMTool lists an Option ROM with Device Path HB0-0:0-0:0-17:0 and VID 0x8086 DID 0x2822. The IDs match a SATA Controller. On Windows there is no such device. The Intel RST controller is reported as 0x8086 0x282A. However that controller has PCIe bus id 00:17.0.
There is another Option ROM for the Graphic and Network controllers. However I am not sure what those Option ROM are about.
How is the RST configuration stored ? Would Option ROM hold some config for RST ?
If I understand you correctly, everything was fine for a while, but suddenly you were not able anymore to to boot into the Linux partition. This indicates, that it is not the BIOS or its modules, which are responsable for the issue. I suspect, that Linux couldn’t be started anymore, because the related EFI GPT boot sector was broken or could not be found.
If I should be right, a BIOS modification may brick your Mini-PC, but would not really solve your problem. Questions:
Where are the different Operating Systems (Linux and Windows) installed and where is the boot sector located?
Which Windows OS did you install and where did you get it?
Who installed the driver for the “Intel(R) Chipset SATA/PCIe RST Premium Controller”, which was listed by the Windows Device Manager, when you made >this< picture? Note: This specific Intel RST driver, which is not in-the-box of any original Windows OS, supports modern Intel SATA RAID Controllers and Intel NVMe Controllers!
What happens, if you replace the currently in-use Intel RST driver (which version?) by the Win10/11 in-box NVMe driver? After the reboot the related Storage Controller will be shown as “Standard NVM Express Controller” and doesn’t support any Intel RST RAID Controller.
