Installing Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 LTS but it's not detecting my Samsung PCIe NVME SSD

Well after a lot of google search I came across this post. The issue was at the BIOS level. In case of Dell desktops and laptops - one has to set the SATA mode to AHCI rather than the default Raid On. If you don't follow the above post - your machine won't boot Windows 10 as the AHCI driver is by default not installed. That's why one need to go into the safemode first then make the changes in BIOS and then disable the safemode. Being in the safemode - it installs the AHCI drivers via which O/S can talk to the drives. After this I booted via the live USB and i can see the Samsung PCIe NVME SSD being visible from the gparted.

I was having this issue with an Acer TC-885-UA92. Brand new, since it came with a windows 10 license, I decided to dual-boot with Linux. First time using a computer with a PCIe NVME SSD. I shrank the partition from Windows 10. The installer wouldn't recognize the empty space, and some installers kept ONLY recognizing the USB drive and wanting to install to it.

From this and other posts I found I tried:

• Tried looking in Gparted, but again only recognized the thumb drive.
• Tried finding through terminal in /dev/ /media /mnt and lsblk wouldnt bring it up either.
• Multiple thumb drives and flashing from different pcs
• Different Distros, none of the installers would recgonize the empty space
  • Linux Mint 19.2, 19.1, even 19.3(beta)
  • KDE Neon
  • Ubuntu 18.04, 19.10, Kubuntu 19.10
• Setting RAID to AHCI
• Disabling Secure Boot
• Disabling "Fast Boot" from within Windows 10

What finally worked for me though was AFTER booting to a usb drive, but BEFORE launching into the live session, going into the boot parameters, and adding nvme_load=YES The installation went without a problem after this.

Some additions to lostsaint's answer:

I followed everything there and got a mostly clean install of Ubuntu 19.10. I needed the "safe graphics" option to get started. See below for important caveat about the instructions. In retrospect it's not clear to me that the RAID/ACPI thing is an issue. The Linux installer couldn't see the NVME root disk in ACPI mode without nvme_load. For those unfamiliar with NVME the disk shows up as /dev/nvme*, nvme0n1p* in my case.

I had messed up graphics on system reboot. I successfully booted with nomodeset and replaced the Nvidia drivers. The answer from Orhan G. Hafif here: Nvidia GTX 1650 not detected in Ubuntu 18.04.3 was most helpful and applied to my 19.10 system.

Now for the major caveat. Before you set things up to boot Windows into safe mode, make sure you have an administrator login that does not need the Internet. Pull your network cable, turn off wireless, and make absolutely sure you can still log in. Otherwise, when Windows is in minimal safe mode it will not let you log in because it has no way of verifying your credentials. Period. Not even a cmd prompt in safe mode. I didn't do this, and wound up removing my login and starting over. It may have been possible to break in, but I couldn't see how and since I hadn't really customized my Windows environment this was the path of least resistance.