Chris Trottier on Nostr: It took me two days to put Linux Mint on my daughter’s Intel NUC, so let me detail ...

It took me two days to put Linux Mint on my daughter’s Intel NUC, so let me detail how I finally got it going.

First off, Linux will not work on RST storage because it’s proprietary. So in BIOS, you have to switch to AHCI. Once that’s done, boot into your Linux USB drive.

Once booted, you’ll notice a problem with the installer: it does not recognize your hard drive. This is because the HDD sits behind an Intel VMD controller that the live USB kernel doesn’t load by default. You have to therefore manually load the VMD kernel module by opening the terminal and typing:

sudo modprobe vmd

This loads the Intel VMD driver, which allows the kernel to see the HDD. Without this, lsblk shows sda but the graphical installer does not.

Next you have to partition the HDD manually. Because the installer still won’t show sda even after loading the VMD module, partition the drive from the terminal first:

sudo parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt
sudo parted /dev/sda mkpart primary fat32 1MiB 513MiB
sudo parted /dev/sda set 1 esp on
sudo parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 513MiB 100%
sudo mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Once the partitions exist and are formatted, the installer can detect and use them.

Finally, you can install Linux Mint. Open the installer and choose Something else. You should now see sda with its two partitions. Assign them:

sda1 → EFI partition. Leave Format unchecked (already formatted).
sda2 → ext4, mount point /. Check Format.
Set “Device for boot loader installation” to /dev/sda.

Click Install Now and complete the installation.

But before you celebrate, you’re not out of the woods yet. There’s a good chance that system will attempt to boot into PXE instead of Linux because—for whatever reason—GRUB didn’t write to sda1. If that happens, boot back into the live USB, load the VMD module again, then chroot and reinstall GRUB manually by inputting this line-by-line in the terminal:

sudo modprobe vmd
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo mount --bind /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /mnt/sys/firmware/efi/efivars
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=ubuntu --recheck
update-grub
exit
sudo reboot

After rebooting, Linux Mint should appear in the UEFI boot menu and load normally. Keep BIOS storage set to AHCI permanently.

This is how I got Linux Mint to finally install on my daughter’s Intel NUC. And thank God. Though this was a long tedious process, this has saved my hundreds of dollars—it was well worth it.