I hope this thread is the right place to ask, I've tried the small Linux problems thread but got no replies.. I have an Acer Predator 17 that's running a proprietary UEFI BIOS implementation that really doesn't like the grub bootloader. No matter what I do, it acts as if the bootloader isn't even there and just boots straight to windows 10. I have secure boot disabled and run my own locked down version of windows 10 pro (no OEM licensing crap). The only thing that fixes it I know of is to disable uefi and boot using legacy, but I can't dual boot to windows 10 because its on uefi. Plus I wanna try to avoid legacy anyways.
Would it be possible to manually put the grub bootloader in a place where the uefi bios would read it?
I'm running the latest bios from Acer, and I'm installing fedora using Rufus on windows 10 with DD mode on my adata flash drive
They may be doing the same shit that Toshiba likes to do sometimes and have the UEFI only recognize the string "Windows boot manager". So what you need to do is the live distro and install efitools and once Ubuntu is installed do NOT reboot. Then manually change "ubuntu boot manager" to "windows boot manager", then reboot.
Awesome. Thanks guys I've tried boot-repair before but it doesn't seem to fix the problem I'm having. Nonetheless, I'll try it again just to be sure. @Dynamic_Gravity thank you so damn much I'll try that tonight if I can. I think you're right about the string.
@SgtAwesomesauce I was originally going to try fedora on this laptop but for simplicity reasons I'll stick with Ubuntu gnome for now. This laptop came with 2 ssd's in a fake raid 0 that I disabled in the bios. So in total as Linux sees it: two 256GB ssds and a 1tb hard drive. The model of the laptop is G9-54M1, comes with: an i7 6700hq, gtx 980m, 16gb of ddr4 ram and a 1080 IPS screen.
OK I installed Ubuntu gnome 16.10 and didn't reboot like you said, opened terminal, did 'sudo apt-get update' and 'sudo apt-get install efitools'. It downloaded and installed it but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to launch it. I tried 'sudo efitools' but nothing happened. Then I tried just searching for it in programs. Nothing. I'm kinda stuck here :(
Unless the man page is for the individual tools themselves.
Shell> bcfg boot dump -v #Show your UEFI boot list Shell> bcfg boot add 3 fs0:EFI[Your path][Your EFI name].efi "[You want to show in list of MB]" #Add a boot to list Shell> bcfg boot rm 3 #Remove a boot from list Shell> bcfg boot mv 3 0 #Change a boot order Shell> help bcfg -v -b #Show bcfg help text
Are you 100% sure you are booting the installation USB in EFI mode? This is very important as to which bootloader gets installed (EFI or Legacy/BIOS). It sounds to me you might be having the legacy ROM enabled, and boot the stick in PC BIOS mode.
If you're unsure about it a (perhaps weird) solution to try might be to re-enable secure boot and try booting from the USB stick.That should force booting in EFI mode.
When booting the USB stick the options given in the bootloader list are windows, command linpus, and command linpus-lite. Whatever the hell those mean I just select one of the two. I believe I've tried both options before and got the same result.
Does "efibootmgr" give an ouput when booted in Linux? When looking at the output from "mount", do you have efivars mounted? Linux needs these to add a boot loader option to the BIOS of your laptop. I'm intrigued by the fact you need to install efi tools after boot.
Also: your EFI partition is mountable on the system, you can view it in the file manager. There should be a folder that contains Linux specific boot files (typically a file called grubx64.efi). If this folder and such a file (the name might vary for linpus) exist, you can add this as a choice for booting using your bios setup (add boot option, browse the disk, point to this efi file). If they don't exist, afaik the system is unbootable.
Okay. I've pinpointed the problem. @Dynamic_Gravity 's link gave me a lot of info about what's going on. Apparently the uefi is hardcoded to only recognize "Windows Boot Manager " as a valid bootloader. I managed to use efibootmgr to delete the created Ubuntu entry from the install, create a new Ubuntu entry under the name of "Windows Boot Manager" with a path to "\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.exe" (shimx64.exe is basically a version of grub that's compatible with secure boot because its signed by m$). Now I had two boot entries labeled "Windows Boot Manager". One going to windows boot file, and one to shimx64.exe. I went in to the bios and changed the boot order to boot the shimx64 one first. I booted up and same thing. No grub, just boots straight to windows. Now I'm thinking I should try again but completely delete the original windows uefi boot entry leaving the fake one that goes to Ubuntu? I'm getting a little lost here but I'm still trying. Thanks guys for helping so much.
Edit: I just tried installing fedora instead of Ubuntu gnome and it works perfectly out of the box. The only downside is I have to spam f12 every time it boots up to bring up the boot menu where it gives the option to boot "command linpus lite" to get to fedora. I tried going in to the bios and changing the boot order, but the boot loader isn't there.
Boot repair worked for dual booting an Acer Predator with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 17 Linux. The steps were:
Change the boot order in the BIOS to boot first with CD/DVD
Install Ubuntu Linux on a hard drive from a DVD.
The system would only boot into Windows.
Boot the system into Ubuntu Linux running live from the DVD.
Install boot-repair into the running live Linux as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
Run the default boot-repair options in the Ubuntu, save the output from boot-repair on http://paste.ubuntu.com/ in case you need to troubleshoot more.
Boot-repair gives you a Windows command to set the boot manager if needed - write down this command exactly.
The system would still only boot into Windows.
Boot to Windows.
Run CMD as administrator.
Set an Ubuntu boot manager