Acer Predator 700 Triton: is dual-booting Linux possible at all?

Hi,

I've recently found that I need to dual-boot Windows 10 and some flavor of Linux in my personal laptop. Unfortunately, I've learned from several different sources that it seems not no be possible whatsoever because the UEFI's SATA mode is locked to "RAID". That prevents Linux installers from recognizing the two NVMe drives I put on my laptop (keeping the old ones as a backup in case I mess up).

So I have several options and questions here:

!) Is it not possible to set the SATA mode some other way than the UEFI? Some threads I've seen mention using an Intel RAID Tool CLI to do so, but I'm getting driver compatibility issues: the tool is for driver version 15.2, installed drivers are 15.44... even after I downgrade intel RST to 15.2 in Windows. Not sure what I'm missing here.

2) Is there any way to get a Linux (at this point I'd be happy with ANY distro) installer to recognize the SSDs behind an RST RAID setup? Currently, my Windows install is running in a single drive, but no Linux installer I've tried recognizes the second, untouched one... even if I remove the Windows drive.

3) Has anybody gotten ahold of a modded BIOS that would allow us to do these changes? If not, is there anything I can do to get a BIOS dump that could be modded? (probably not the right place to ask and I risk getting banned for this question, but whatever)

This issue is causing some serious issues, to the point I'm thinking about requesting a refund. Locking the hardware features in this way is simply absurd, and I wouldn't have purchased this laptop if I had known.

Accepted answers

All comments

TheBozzCL

Just a quick update, for anyone who cares: I managed to get a copy of the Intel RST CLI (aka RAID Tool) working with my system. It's a bit ugly, though: https://communities.intel.com/message/414989#414989 . TL;DR: download an older version, edit one hex value to bypass the version check. I confirmed that works because I managed to destroy the RAID array in my original disks. No recovering from there, I guess, but I already have Windows running on the new disks.

The bad news: that doesn't change the SATA mode to AHCI in the UEFI, it's still locked to RAID. I was hoping there was some syncing going on between the drivers and the UEFI that got skipped because I just changed the disks, but no dice. It's obviously a setting hidden or locked in the UEFI itself.