There are three NVMe’s in a laptop. Two of the NVMe’s are the exact same model, Intel, and the other is a Kingston NVMe. All NVMe’s are 512GB. All are running either Windows 11 on the two identical drives, or Windows 10 on the Kingston drive. I want to keep only the second NVMe drive with Windows 11, and overwrite the first NVMe one, with Ubuntu.

However, when Ubuntu installation starts up, the NVMe drives show up as nvme0n1, nvme1n1 and nvme2n1.

The drives are as follows and their Bus Numbers as per the BIOS, are as follows:

1 – Intel SSDPEKNW512G8, Bus:2, Dev: 0, Func: 0
2 – Kingston RBUSNS8154P3512GJ3, Bus: 3, Dev: 0, Func: 0
3 – SSDPEKNW512G8, Bus: 4, Dev: 0, Func: 0

How do I tell which one I can overwrite without destroying drive #3 above, which I need to ensure retains the Windows 11 installation?

It turns out we can tell from the Ubuntu Installation command line as follows:

• Press Ctrl – Alt – T, to open the Ubuntu Installation Linux command line.
• Issue

  sudo su –

  to become the root (superuser)

• Issue the following command to list the drives:

  lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,VENDOR,MODEL

• That should give you printout similar to:

  nvme0n1 476.9G Intel SSDPEKNW512G8
  nvme1n1 476.9G Kingston RBUSNS8154P3512GJ3
  nvme2n1 476.9G Intel SSDPEKNW512G8

• Next issue the following to list the bus numbers for each of the NVMe drives:

  lspci|grep -Ei “nvme|ssd”

• This will list the SSD’s with their Bus numbers as follows:

  02:00:00 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation SSD 660P Series (rev 03)
  03:00:00 Non-Volatile memory controller: Kingston Technology Company, Inc.  A1000/U-SNS8154P3 x2 NVMe SSD (rev 01)
  04:00:00 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation SSD 660P Series (rev 03)

• Each number above corresponding to the Bus identified in BIOS earlier.

An additional check that can be ran is using

fdisk -l

in Linux and comparing that to the Windows 10/11 diskpart output.  Both commands will display a Disk ID or Disk Identifier, that is unique for the filesystem MBR when the partitions were first created and laid down.  This won’t change until the disk is repartitioned.

Steps on Linux

• Start a Terminal.
• Become root:

  sudo su –

• Execute

  fdisk -l

On Windows 10/11:

• Start command prompt as administrator.
• Execute:

  diskpart

• Within diskpart, execute the following:

  select disk 0                 # Change to the disk you wish to check other then 0.
  detail disk

The additional, or secondary check could also be the only check needed or possible, since the windows Bus Information as “Bus Number 0” appeared for all the drives.  This was confusing.

Regardless, Happy Installing!

Cheers,
HTH