Installing an OS without a CD or USB due to bios limitations

Hello! I bought a Nitro 5 today and while I was trying to set up an OS on it I came across a very big loophole of system limitations- and it all comes from the current bios version which is either very new, or very old and it does not support legacy boot from a USB drive. It only shows the UEFI boot option, even with secure boot disabled. Without an USB option I cannot rollback/update the bios, and I cannot install UEFI to enable USB boot from there either.
I found this while googling the enormous amounts of possible problems with this, ranging from "BIOS not detecting USB" to "No legacy boot option BIOS": https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/203043/no-legacy-option-in-f2-setting-just-uefi-acer-aspire-e1-410
Unfortunately there the only person who made a contribution to the top, istanacomputer, uses the legacy boot option to boot from USB/CD, therefore it is not of much use to me.

My question is, how would one go with such a brainstorm of issues with the BIOS? The preinstalled fedora-like Linpus is out of the question as it has no GUI or proper commands for hard drive formatting.
I thought of having an external hard drive with an OS, but then again, it is connected via USB, isn't it? So it will not work. My other decent bet was taking out the hard drive and installing an OS on it from my PC, but considering how new the laptop is, I am afraid of breaking something in the process of taking the hard drive and putting it back in, even though I have had a decent amount of experience with hardware and PC building.

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christy1

Hi @richelieu,

Good you tried so many steps.set the supervisor password and then try to change the uefi options. if not Try to do a bios defaults by f9 and save it with f10 in bios->> when the computer restarts go to the boot options with f12. check if the usb is detected. hope it will be helpful.

richelieu

Thanks for the quick input!
By the time opened the thread I had already created a supervisor password and tried stuff like disabling secure boot, but it didn't seem to work, it still wasn't detecting the USB drive due to no legacy option.
I just tried resetting the BIOS defaults with F9 as you told me, but it is of no use, it does not detect the USB as a boot option and does not give me the option to switch to legacy either.

christy1

richelieu said:

Thanks for the quick input!
By the time opened the thread I had already created a supervisor password and tried stuff like disabling secure boot, but it didn't seem to work, it still wasn't detecting the USB drive due to no legacy option.
I just tried resetting the BIOS defaults with F9 as you told me, but it is of no use, it does not detect the USB as a boot option and does not give me the option to switch to legacy either.

Was the unit detecting the usb before? did you check with other ports?

richelieu

It does detect the USB itself, that I know from experimenting a bit with the preinstalled Linpus.
And while it does see that there is an USB drive attached, it doesn't recognise it as a boot option.
The USB drive works aswell, I have used it over a dozen times for the same thing already.

christy1

richelieu said:

It does detect the USB itself, that I know from experimenting a bit with the preinstalled Linpus.
And while it does see that there is an USB drive attached, it doesn't recognise it as a boot option.
The USB drive works aswell, I have used it over a dozen times for the same thing already.