Installing on ACER Aspire 5

WetGeek

It took my wife about three days to get fed up with Windows 11, which came on her new laptop. She wants the games she's always played on Solus (e.g., Spider, shisen-sho, mahjongg), but the Windows games fall short.

After discussing the possible consequences of a Solus installation (might lose Windows 11 forever), she told me to go for it, so I set out to do that. I installed a 500GB SATA SSD in the Disk 1 slot, and left Disk 0 alone. With 500GB for Solus, I didn't think we needed to do anything with the original disk.

I made the usual adjustments in the UEFI, and it identifies both disks, inclujding the 500GB Disk 1. But I can't get the disks to show up for the boot order. Just Windows Boot Manager and the USB stick. So I can boot the Solus installer, but the only disk it can find is the USB stick. And that's all that GPARTED or the KDE partition manager can find.

I suspect that it's the Windows Boot Manager that is hiding the disks from everything but Windows. Does anyone know how I can disable that? There isn't any obvious way in the UEFI to disable it, or to insert the two disks into the boot order.

brent

WetGeek But I can't get the disks to show up for the boot order. Just Windows Boot Manager and the USB stick. So I can boot the Solus installer, but the only disk it can find is the USB stick. And that's all that GPARTED or the KDE partition manager can find.

I suspect that it's the Windows Boot Manager that is hiding the disks from everything but Windows.

this identical scenario is covered in depth by tomharsbach and brucehankins in the 'dual boot' thread below. if slot 0 is windows then you may need to reinstall that or at least erase existing partitions if there are any. the goal, I take from the dual boot thread, was to make a boot on both disks but to unify them in the bios. Hope I have that right..

tomscharbach

WetGeek After discussing the possible consequences of a Solus installation (might lose Windows 11 forever)

Just a note: Windows 11, like Windows 10, is licensed to the computer's motherboard and is persistent after the license authenticates. The license doesn't terminate if you install another operating system on the computer -- the license remains valid and you can install Windows 11 (or Windows 10 if applicable) again anytime you want to, even several years later. I do it all the time with various computers at home and at the railroad museum.

WetGeek

brent this identical scenario is covered in depth by tomharsbach and brucehankins in the 'dual boot' thread below

Just to make sure we're clear about what's happening ... I have no interest in a dual boot. I only want to get rid of the Windows Boot Manager that appears to be hiding both installed disks from anything but Windows. I can find no way in the UEFI settings to turn it off.

brent

WetGeek (I was not clear on that, my bad. Although I think in that thread they just deleted the boot manager right off the windows hdd, manually.)

WetGeek

brent I was not clear on that

As I said in my post, I've found no way to SEE the disks from outside the UEFI settings. Can't do it with GPARTED, can't do it with KDE Partition Manager. Tomorrow I'll take a look around in Windows, but I'm not very hopeful about that. Whatever is keeping these drives hidden should be in the UEFI settings somewhere. I just haven't found it yet.

Brucehankins

WetGeek physically disconnect the windows drive entirely and boot straight to the live USB with only your target drive connected and see if it can be found then. With only the target drive installed, you should be able to identify it easily.

tomscharbach

Brucehankins physically disconnect the windows drive entirely and boot straight to the live USB with only your target drive connected and see if it can be found then. With only the target drive installed, you should be able to identify it easily.

I agree with this comment.

WetGeek Building on Bruce's comment, and assuming that you have set the computer's BIOS up for Solus (UEFI, GPT formatting, Secure Boot disabled, SATA set to AHCI rather than RAID, and so on) and you are dead certain that your Solus LIVE USB boots, then you might consider going into BIOS and removing the Windows Boot Manager.

However, a caution: Before you do this, see what you can find out about Asus issues with Linus installations. I mention it only because I recall reading someplace that Asus locks down its computers in ways that aren't normal, but I don't recall the details. Your instinct that there might be something in the BIOS that is blocking you might be correct.

If I may ask what is probably a dumb question, why not install Solus on the computer's primary drive, using a "destructive" install on that drive (that is, "Completely erase the drive ..." rather than "Install alongside ...")? Otherwise, it seems to me that you will end up with the computer's primary drive still containing Windows partitions and files, for no apparent purpose.

pomon

Maybe it will help

528491

I don't know much about this, but here are some thoughts:
You could try to physically remove the Windows Disk from the Laptop. I mean, if somehow the Windows Bootloader is causing this, it should stop when it's gone, right?
Maybe a TPM related problem? Can/did you disable TPM in UEFI?

WetGeek

tomscharbach why not install Solus on the computer's primary drive

Thanks but as I mentioned, NEITHER Drive 0 NOR Drive 1 is visible to a Solus installer. They're invisible outside of Windows or the UEFI settings. The installer can't install over the primary drive, because it can't see it.

I've posted all the details in the ACER forum as well, and I'm hoping for some joy from there.

WetGeek

tomscharbach you might consider going into BIOS and removing the Windows Boot Manager.

I did that on an ACER Aspire 5 that my wife used a few years ago, but its native OS was Windows 10. Removing the Windows Boot Manager as a boot target was as easy as removing any disk. And the disks on that machine were inn no way hidden. But there's no apparent way to do that in this Windows 11 mode.

I predict that by Windows 12, there will be no way to install a competing OS at all. We're already very close to that, if not there already. Seems like an anti-trust violation to me.

tomscharbach

WetGeek I did that on an ACER Aspire 5 that my wife used a few years ago, but its native OS was Windows 10. Removing the Windows Boot Manager as a boot target was as easy as removing any disk. And the disks on that machine were inn no way hidden. But there's no apparent way to do that in this Windows 11 mode.

That's just not correct.

I installed Solus on two computers yesterday (a Dell Latitude 11-3180, running Windows 10, and a Dell Optiplex 7070 running Windows 11) during my annual rebuild process. In both cases, I created the Solus USB using Rufus on a different Windows 11 computer, entered BIOS and removed all boot managers on the target computer, and then installed Solus using the "destructive install" methods described in my rather long "how to" comment on "Windows dual boot (on seperate HDD"). I realize that you have no interest in dual-booting, but the issues and general process is common to both dual-OS booting and single-OS booting -- remove all bootloaders in BIOS and proceed.

WetGeek Thanks but as I mentioned, NEITHER Drive 0 NOR Drive 1 is visible to a Solus installer. They're invisible outside of Windows or the UEFI settings. The installer can't install over the primary drive, because it can't see it.

Here are some things I would look at:

(1) Is either disk (the primary or the secondary) encrypted? Windows 10/11 Pro/Enterprise encrypts disks with BitLocker by default, but I am assuming that you are running Windows 11 Home. Windows 11 Home has a somewhat similar protection method ("Device Encryption") but I don't think that it is enabled by default. If Acer's Windows 11 installation has Device Encryption or something similar enabled that might be why the drives are recognized in BIOS but not visible to you Solus USB.

(2) I haven't used an Acer computer in over a decade, but I have yet to see a computer BIOS that doesn't have a way to remove and reorder boot loaders in the BIOS. BIOS precedes the OS, so Windows is almost certainly not the block, because Windows doesn't have the ability to modify the BIOS other than to add the Windows Boot Manager. Are you absolutely sure that you If the Acer BIOS does not allow you to remove bootloaders, then you need to look at what Acer is doing to lock up the BIOS in some strange way.

(3) You might want to figure out what drive M2/PCIe/NVMe/SATA controller is being used by the computer and check whether the kernel supports that controller.

(4) Do you have the ability (e.g. external drive cases for M2 and/or SSD) to remove the disks from your Acer, plug them into another computer and wipe and reinitialize the disks? If you, you might try that to see if you can get to a clean drive.

(5) You might consider downloading the Windows Media Creation Tool for Windows 11 and doing a clean "destructive" reinstall of Windows 11 on the Acer. If Acer is doing something like encrypting on the sly, that should clear the problem.

I hope you find an answer on the Acer forum.

WetGeek

tomscharbach That's just not correct.

To quote a friend, that's just not correct. When you're able to do the same with an ACER Aspire 5 running Windows 11 Home S, I'll believe that you have a solution for me.

It's entirelly possible that the ACER firmware is very different from the Dell firmware. I've installed Solus on at least a dozen computers that originally arrived running Windows, and I'm telling you it's apparently not possible on this one. It's locked down VERY well.

And this ACER Aspire 5's firmware is very different from the firmware on the ACER Aspire 5 that my wife previously had ... the one that came with Windows 10, and on which I installed Solus Budgie.

I even removed S mode on this machine, and that made no difference.

tomscharbach

WetGeek To quote a friend, that's just not correct. When you're able to do the same with an ACER Aspire 5 running Windows 11 Home S, I'll believe that you have a solution for me.

It's entirelly possible that the ACER firmware is very different from the Dell firmware. I've installed Solus on at least a dozen computers that originally arrived running Windows, and I'm telling you it's apparently not possible on this one. It's locked down VERY well.

And this ACER Aspire 5's firmware is very different from the firmware on the ACER Aspire 5 that my wife previously had ... the one that came with Windows 10, and on which I installed Solus Budgie.

I even removed S mode on this machine, and that made no difference.

It sounds like an Acer issue, not a Windows 11 issue or a Solus issue. I think that you are going to have to chase down the solution with Acer. Again, I don't use Acer computers, but I really wonder if Acer has encrypted the drives.

Brucehankins

To add to this a bit, if the new target drive is visible for another machine, you can use shred to destroy the disk and know you're starting with a completely blank slate.

You could also install Solus by having the drive in another machine and then try booting it in the new laptop. Of course you'd need to run DoFlicky to grab any needed drivers etc., but I've also swapped disks from machine to machine before without any issues. Of course YMMV.

WetGeek

Brucehankins You could also install Solus by having the drive in another machine and then try booting it in the new laptop.

Yep, I did that one time by using my laptop to boot a disk I'd first installed Solus on in my server with swappable disks. It worked fine there.

But since we've already discovered that neither of the disks in the Acer show up in the F12 boot menu, there would be no way to boot it no matter where Solus was installed on it. This machine is going back to Amazon.

They listed it as coming with Windows 10. Instead, it came with Windows 11. So it's not "as advertised."

Brucehankins

WetGeek neither of the disks in the Acer show up in the F12 boot menu

Wouldn't having only the drive with Solus installed bypass the need for the boot target menu?

kuki

you need to change the disk organization in the [SATA] grouping to AHCI.

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/installing-linux-on-an-acer-aspire-5-a515-55-laptop/15969

WetGeek

kuki you need to change the disk organization in the [SATA] grouping to AHCI.

Thanks for finding that link, Kuki. It seems to point to old information, though. There are 5 pages of settings in the firmware for this computer, and when Ctrl+S did nothing on the Main tab, tried it on the other 4 tabs as well. Nowhere does that key combination expose a SATA section.

WetGeek

kuki you need to change the disk organization in the [SATA] grouping to AHCI

Kuki, when I followed those directions, apparently nothing happened. But it actually did. I was looking for a [SATA] setting to appear, and didn't notice that a [VMD] setting had done so.

Someone from the ACER forum told me about that, and it turned out to be the solution. It's an Intel protocol that needs to be disabled in order for drives that are NOT the primary Windows drive to be listed in the boot options page, and to be exposed to OSs other than Windows.

FINALLY I was able to get Solus installed on that 500GB drive, make it the first entry in the boot order, and successfully booted into Budgie.

The only problem now is that Budgie can't access the WiFi radio. I've ordered a dongle from Amazon, and with any luck I'll be able to update that machine tomorrow. Hoping it will work with our current kernel. The item description says it works with Linux kernel up to 4.4.3, but I'm hoping that's just old advertising data.

Why ACER feels it's necessary to hide that setting and require a secret keypress to expose it is beyone me!

WetGeek

Brucehankins Wouldn't having only the drive with Solus installed bypass the need for the boot target menu?

Either that, or it would simply display a "No bootable drive found" error message," depending on the details of its method of being locked down.