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shardul
Asked: 2020-10-23 05:37:45 +0800 CST

Acer Aspire 5 Linux install

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Sorry to bother, I hope everything is fine.

Today I received my laptop, an Acer Aspire 5 (A515-44G-R9YM - with the Ryzen 7 4700U one). It came with Free DOS and I've tried to install Ubuntu on it. I did this with a live USB(downloaded Rufus and Ubuntu 20.4 iso from their official website) and everything went smooth during the whole installation process. However, after the install I was prompted to restart the laptop. I initiated the restart. During the boot up process, I could only see ACER's SPLASH image after which I got a black screen and on the left top corner there was a little underline sign that kept flashing every 0.5 seconds. I've waited, and waited, and waited, and nothing happened.

Since then, I've reinstalled Ubuntu 5 times! Each time, I got the same issue. I tried to install Ubuntu 18.04, and this time I got this output on my laptop screen :

dev/nvme0n1p2 clear .... blocks ....

To be honest, in the BIOS interface there weren't many options and settings to check. My USB stick got detected by the laptop(I know that for sure because I used 2 different ones) but not under its name, under "Linpus Linux" or something. And there was no setting such as Legacy USB support to enable and help me out or something. To be honest, it's my first time installing Linux on my system (I've been a Windows user for over 11 years now), so it's most likely that I've missed something. Does anyone know what I can do ?

Thank you all for your time !

system-installation boot acer usb-installation

1 Answers

  1. Acer BIOS/UEFI often has an extra menu only accessible if you set a supervisor password. Acers are notoriously difficult to install Linux on.

    Try these steps:

    They assume that you have installed Ubuntu, but some steps might also be required for booting from a Live USB

    Always make sure your UEFI is up to date. If you can't access the TRUSTED menu, you may have to mount the EFI partition.

    To mount the EFI partition, you need to:

    1. Install Ubuntu; (You should have done this already)

    2. Boot into a live session using your Ubuntu USB and select "Try without installing";

    3. Launch Gparted to get the EFI partition address. I think yours is dev/nvme0n1p2 from what you posted above but it might not be. If not, or you don't know, post a screenshot of GParted.

    4. While still in the live session, Open the Terminal (ctrl + alt + T);

    5. In the Terminal execute the following to create a directory in the "media" folder and to mount the EFI partition to that folder:

      sudo mkdir /media/EFI

      sudo mount dev/nvme0n1p2 /media/EFI (Or change dev/nvme0n1p2 to whatever you found in GParted).

    *Update

    While in the terminal,

    sudo mkdir /media/EFI/EFI/Linux

    sudo cp -R /media/EFI/EFI/ubuntu /media/EFI/EFI/Linux

    1. Exit the live session and reboot into UEFI
    2. In UEFI, you must set a supervisor password. Once the supervisor password is set, some new menus are accessible.
    3. Enter the "Select an UEFI file as trusted for executing" menu. It will allow you to declare the newly installed Ubuntu boot image as trusted on your laptop.
    4. Select EMMC >> EFI >> Ubuntu and select the file shimx64.efi. (It might have a different name on your machine eg. Linux) You will be prompted to give it a name of your choice (which will appear in the F12 boot options).
    5. Type the name press Enter and then "Yes" should be highlighted.
    6. Press enter again. Restart the computer without any boot disk and tap F12 during the boot process.
    7. You should now get the boot option menu with the name you chose.
    8. You can change the boot order in UEFI now so that it boots directly to the Grub screen.
    9. Either disable the supervisor password, or save it in a secure place.

    Hopefully Ubuntu will boot.

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