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I'm attempting to install linux mint on my pc with a hybrid drive system (SSD and disk); not dual boot.

I'm booting linux mint from a usb and install is erroring on grub install, but says the installation is successful. Additionally, the pc won't boot into linux. I believe this is partially due to the SSD disk (used for startup).

I've formatted the hard disk, but the SSD is read only and I've attempted sudo chown to the mounted SSD partition, but am getting: chown: changing ownership of '/media/mint/Windows': Read-only file system

I've also attempted various things in gparted and gnome disk management.

I have no access to windows, as the boot manager was corrupt and I've deleted the files on the primary disk.

How can I reformat/remove the partitions from the SSD and change it to read/write?

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Hmmm, that's a bit of an odd issue.

In order to format the drive / edit partitions, you'll need to have those partitions unmounted first - otherwise it won't work. You also need to be running your partition editor with sudo privileges (or as root) otherwise that will also prevent it from working.

Does the drive have a physical read-only switch you may have flipped? Other than that... the fact your SSD is coming up as read-only (and corrupted the Windows boot manager) strongly suggests (to me anyway) the possibility you may just have a dead drive on your hands. I've seen that failure mode a couple times across a couple different SSDs - they do die sometimes, sadly. It's possible low-level drive commands might be able to stop it acting as a read-only drive for a bit (they often do that once they've reached their wear limits, but sometimes the manufacturer will allow you to bypass the restriction) - although unfortunately I can't remember for the life of me what those commands actually are, and in any case you wouldn't want to run your OS off a drive in that state since data corruption would likely become a major issue very quickly.

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  • Thanks for the info. Follow up: I have another drive in the laptop that I'm going to install linux on, my issue is that I want to prevent the SSD (still containing windows EFI, boot, Windows RE, etc.) from interfering with the boot process of linux. And I'll add that with windows corrupted boot manager, I could only get into bios, but none of the other keys worked (such as boot into safe mode, etc.)
    – Jason
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 2:24
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    It won't interfere with the boot process if you do a fresh GRUB install to the new disk, and boot directly from the new disk in the BIOS :)
    – re-cursion
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 4:06

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