NVMe drive can't be partitioned or formatted [SOLVED]

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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Hello all. Got a problem here with a 1 TB AZW NVMe drive. While trying to install a Linux distro, something went wrong–don’t know what happened but now the system doesn’t want to write to it at all, nor create a new partition table, or new partition. I’ve tried all the regular programs, like fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, gparted, partitionmanager, gnome-disk-utility, and on it goes. I even tried wiping the disk with the dd command; here’s the message I got from that:

Blockquote
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda status=progress
[sudo] password for grgaud:
dd: writing to ‘/dev/sda’: No space left on device
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied, 5.5444e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s
Blockquote

I also tried listing the drives with lsblk. it recognizes the drive as /dev/sda, but I can’t do anything with it. Is it possible I permanently bricked my NVMe drive? BTW, the drive is attached to a USB container.

3

Try a low-level format

4

the nvme would not be called /dev/sda would it? I thought they were /dev/nvmeXXX?

anyway agree w/@dalto – in the live environment just format it gpt via Gparted. That’s my go-to formatter.

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Remove the nvme drive from the usb disclosure and try it in a pc (or in a pci express adapter card)

That is the only way to know if the drive is damaged or the usb disclosure is at fault

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It shows like /dev/sdX when it is connected externally even if NVME.

1 Like
8

correct :wink:

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9

Maybe your disk have a ‘write protect switch’ (Read only or read/write) … Make the disk writable !
Have you tried with ‘gdisk’ ?
Maybe your disk is damaged…

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Hello fred666,
That was the problem. I removed the M.2 drive from the USB enclosure, installed it in my other box, used gparted to re-partition, and my M.2 drive lives again. Thank you very much.

grgaud1

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