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:
<pre>NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
nvme0n1 259:0 0 953.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1M 0 part
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 513M 0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 953.4G 0 part / </pre>


lsblk is as low level as it gets, no? Anyway, gparted sees nothing either, nor does Mint’s Disks.
Driver issue? For a hard drive? Ok… Uh, so what do I install exactly?
Edit: Check the edit to my post.
I’m not seeing any image attachments in case you added that.
Some brand of NVME SSDs are the only thing I’ve seen live driver issues on where the disk appeared invisible until drivers were installed, in one case the pre-installed Intel SSD drivers had to be disabled too because they were incorrectly taking priority.