I bought an Acer Aspire 1 model A114-31-C4HH and I immediately wiped windows off it because I wanted Xubuntu on there and it only has a 32gig hard drive. Everything was fine, I booted into a live USB and got it installing but it got stuck several times and several times I reset it. No problems yet, but the last time it got the farthest yet, it said it was installing grub but was stuck there for over an hour, so I reset it with the idea of disabling secure boot, but now I cannot get into the bios. Pressing F2 presents me with a black screen with only a non blinking white cursor "_" on the top left. If I don't press F2 I get instead a splash screen with the message secure boot fail. Previously after a failed install it would just say no bootable device found.
I have already tried opening it up and disconnecting both the battery and the button cell battery, but I still get the same problem. Any help would be appreciated.
I should also note that windows worked fine while it was still there, and the Xubuntu live USB worked flawlessly, recognizing the wifi adapter and even the Bluetooth module.
I called Acer tech support and they suggested I buy a windows USB to repair the system. It seems they couldn't understand that without access to the bios I can't change the boot order for it to boot from a usb stick. They even said that because of the linux install there is no bios left on the machine, which seems completely wrong so I don't think they'll be much help.
I'm racking my brain trying to think of what might be wrong. I think it still has a working non corrupt bios because it recognized that there is a bootable drive and that it failed security boot. So I'm thinking there is something stopping it from displaying the bios menu. I don't think it's a display issue because it shows the Acer splash fine, and also the secure boot fail message shows up perfectly. So there must be something else leaving me with a solid white cursor.
