RumpDisk

The Hurd supports modern SATA devices like SSDs with RumpDisk. If you successfully installed the Hurd in real hardware, via toggling the "compatibility" mode in your BIOS, then the Hurd is probably using old Linux drivers to access your hard drive/SSD. Even more problematic, those drivers are baked into the GNU Mach kernel! With rumpdisk, you can use SSDs on the Hurd and enjoy a max partition size of 2 TiB!

If you want to test if the Hurd can boot with your SSD, change any occurence of hdN in /boot/grub/grub.cfg to wdN, where N is a number, and add the noide option on the multiboot line, (which disables the old Linux disk drivers). Also change any occurence of hdN in your /etc/fstab to wdN.

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

# multiboot /boot/gnumach-1.8-486.gz root=part:2:device:hd0 console=com0
multiboot   /boot/gnumach-1.8-486.gz root=part:2:device:wd0 console=com0 noide

/etc/fstab

#/dev/hd0s2      /               ext2    defaults        0       1
/dev/wd0s2      /               ext2    defaults        0       1
#/dev/hd0s1      none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/wd0s1      none            swap    sw              0       0
#/dev/hd2        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 noauto          0       0
/dev/wd2        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 noauto          0       0

Then reboot your machine. As of Feb 2026, due to an odd bug, you may need to add "-M q35" to your qemu invocation. Before Grub appears change "compatibility" in your BIOS to "AHCI" (not "RAID"). If you successfully boot, congrats! You are now using rumpdisk! You can permanently add in the "noide" option to grub:

/etc/default/grub

# make sure you add this next line somewhere in the file
GRUB_CMDLINE_GNUMACH="noide"

Now you can run update-grub. That way when you update the kernel, you can be sure to use rumpdisk.

rumpdisk is normally already set up on /dev/rumpdisk.

$ showtrans /dev/rumpdisk
/hurd/rumpdisk