Solution: There never was a second drive. It must have been a partition that got wiped with the install, but there's only the NVME in there. Sorry, guys. I dig around in my innards very frequently and just thought I was mounting a second drive this entire time. Hooray for backups.

reinstalled Mint and my second drive is absolutely invisible to everything. I can't mount what I can't see. I'm thinking of unplugging it and plugging it back in just because I'm out of ideas.

What could have caused a drive to become invisible after a reinstall?

Edit: Checked bios. All security disabled. Using AHCI and UEFI (tried CSM). I don't really know what these things mean, I just know things were working properly before I reinstalled mint so I'm puzzled why it could be a BIOS issue.

Current lsblk:

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[–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Look in your BIOS for Intel Optane and deactivate it. It is not supported on Linux because it is buggy and can lead to data loss. That's why drives using that aren't showing.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    What? I thought Optane was a weird hybrid drive for mostly laptops I'm running a self-built desktop that's over 10 years old with an MSI Mobo. I was just in settings because something else led me to think it might be a BIOS issue, but didn't see any Optane.

    But why would go from one-year-ago-Mint to today-Mint trigger any bios issues?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, then it wasn't that. Had that trouble with my wife's laptop. And the other day it just reset its BIOS settings by itself, booting back into Windows and activating the Optane stuff.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago

    Haha it's for the security of her data of course!

    Linux is my last stop for desktop computers. I'll probably still always have one, but I'm transitioning to using mobile devices more. But for media storage and setup, I still can't beat a desktop.

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