W.r.t. "There should simply be a /dev/nvme0n1 device that you can use with fdisk or gdisk or gparted to make partitions..." such can be seen, in my example, via the Gnome Disk utility, prior to me using gparted etc. IIRC a GPT partition table is required/better for larger disk sizes than I've used and IIRC, possibly for the size used by the O.P.If lspci does not show your PCIe NVMe storage device, then that is a showstopper and can have various causes. I know not every random M.2 NVMe SSD is supported by a Pi5 (and some M.2 adapter board). What works and what not I don't know. Maybe you have wrong content/settings in config.txt or EEPROM
There should simply be a /dev/nvme0n1 device that you can use with fdisk or gdisk or gparted to make partitions. You can also use the /dev/nvme0n1 as whole raw blockdevice directly without partitions in Linux but Windows will not understand that I think, it is also uncommon and confusing in Linux.
'MBR' is MasterBootRecord and is a piece of binary code that sits in the first 440 bytes of a blockdevice and was used in the past to boot x86 BIOS PC, from floppies etc. It is also the place where viruses used to live. With MBR you mean the old style 4-entry partition table format that is in the same 512-byte sized first sector just after the 440 binary x86 boot code. So for ARM computers, MBR 440 bytes shall be zeros actually.
Pi4 and Pi5 understand new-style 128 entry GPT partition table as well, so if you want you can make many separated partitions on a storage device, but most people are not aware and they just create 1 large one occupying the whole thing.
Trev.
Statistics: Posted by FTrevorGowen — Fri May 09, 2025 6:39 pm