Laptop installer not detecting HDD

Troubleshooting
1

I am trying to install DietPi on an inherited Acer Aspire 3 (A314-22), which currently has Windows 10 (in safe mode) pre-installed on it.

I prepared a Ventoy USB (SanDisk Cruzer Blade 2.0 USB) with the Dietpi x86_64 UEFI installer image on it, and I am able to boot from it.

I chose automatic installation (I am happy with wiping the Windows installation…) and it seemed to run OK until Clonezilla reaches “Choose the target disk(s)”. At this point, it only shows the SanDisk USB as an option and doesn’t seem to detect the computer’s HDD at all, so I am unable to proceed further.

Any thoughts?

(I have been using Linux/Unix machines for many years, but I am not a systems person and this is my first attempt at installing Linux myself…)

Many thanks!

2

When ever I have an issue like this I usually grab a live linux image (ubuntu or something) and boot off of that. Once booted you can then use the linux tools (not install) from there to see if your disk shows up at all in that OS. Also from that point you can wipe out all disk partitions, make a single one and then format it to something linux knows like ext4. Once that is done you can try again, at least you know you have a clean hdd to start.

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