Legacy bios on aspire 3 a315-54-50pg

This has driven me crazy. Why won't my aspire 3 let me use legacy? Ive done all the tutorials, set supervisor password and disable secure boot. Spoke to Acer suppoet who are the biggest waste of my life to date. First gave me instructions to enable legacy. Then tells me this laptop is not capable of legacy and I should take it back to the store and call them from there and they will get me a refund. I did this and both Argos and Acer were trying to blame eachother which left me to take the blame somehow. Acer then offered to take the laptop back to change the motherboard (I have these calls recorded). I got it back today and they have done nothing, just sent it back with a piece of paper saying "no faults". I ring Acer again and state they have changed nothing and was told we only do repairs and get lost basically. Ive had the phone put down on me 3 times by Acer and twice by Argos. I hope this thread gets noticed because I never knew that such terrible customer service existed. I'm no expert but I'm hoping there is someway I can flash a new bios onto the laptop where I can get Linux on this windows 10 brick....

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aphanic

Hang in there and don't despair, while I may not have the same laptop as you do I have an A515-54G maybe it is close enough

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Try to break it down for me, what is preventing you from installing Linux in there? I can try to replicate your settings in my machine and guide you through, because a couple of hours ago I was able to boot off of a Mint USB even with Secure Boot enabled without any problem (well, a couple of components were too new and still didn't have out of the box support).

A couple of things that pop through my mind that could be related:

Is there an storage mode operation setting in your BIOS? Something that allows you to choose from AHCI to other options. Because mine has, but it's hidden after the latest firmware (I have to press Ctrl+S for it to appear) and when I select RST+Optane in that setting detecting the internal SSD gets tricky in Linux (probably because of the newer chipsets, my laptop has a Comet Lake processor).
Secure Boot, if the distro you're trying to install doesn't have a properly signed bootloader or its key isn't enrolled in the enclave (no idea how to do it right now, didn't mess with it) chances are you're unable to boot off of the installation media. Mint didn't seem to have any problem, but I'm sure others do and to disable it, the access password needs to be set (as you've already experienced haha).

But that ought to be it... I mean, Linux has supported UEFI for a long while now, as long as the digital signature restriction is turned off or keys enrolled you should be able to clean up the drive and install a Linux distro if you so desire.

Connedangry

Hi, thanks for the response. I've made an bootable windows 10 iso usb to start with just to get it to see the usb in the bootloader. Whatever settings I've tried I only get the HDD showing and no usb. Did you install mint or a have a live usb?

aphanic

I didn't install Mint yet, it was a means to troubleshoot a problem another user was having regarding WiFi (it was acting up on Windows with 5GHz networks) so we were to see if the problem was present in Linux as well.

Booting off of USB drives in UEFI and with Secure Boot enabled can be a pain sometimes, most likely the drive you had was formatted as NTFS which would be totally fine for an old machine but when UEFI is into the mix the drive must be FAT32 formatted (most Windows images don't get over the 4GB file limit for FAT32, and if it does it's usually a file called install.wim inside of the sources folder which can be split with DISM in two parts, but I digress... haha

I wonder if what I can do to disable Secure Boot works for your firmware as well, and then you should have no trouble getting a Linux installation underway (when on Windows I tend to use Rufus to create bootable stuff, be it Linux or Windows it handles things appropriately).

Anyway, just took some pictures:

This is the screen where I need to press Ctrl+S for the SATA mode to appear (ideally, I'd rather stay with RST instead of the aging AHCI, but it may not be an option for now in Linux for my hardware):
Since I had Secure Boot enabled, I'd first need to reset it to change its state from Standard to custom (saving and rebooting in-between):
And then I was able to disable Secure Boot altogether in the next tab:
After a reboot Secure Boot was disabled, and while the system is still an UEFI one no signature checking is performed. Pretty much any distribution I can think of is capable of being installed and booted from in this state (note the greyed out settings for Secure Boot):

Are you able to do something like that in your machine? If you have access to Windows try using Rufus to create a bootable drive (even for Windows) and see if it appears in the boot menu (whether with Secure Boot enabled or not). Note that if you change the boot mode operation (RST to AHCI or vice versa) you probably won't be able to boot Windows anymore without a re-deployment (grosso modo, it expects the boot volume to be some place and it is in another, it doesn't take these kinds of things lightly).

Connedangry

Hi when I press control s I get the option for sata mode: ahci or optance without raid. I set a supervisor password and disabled secure boot but still not seeing the usb in bootloader. This is after disabling the supervisor password and restart. Also have disabled fast boot.

Connedangry

aphanic

That's... annoying to say the least, how come I can boot off of a Mint USB stick even with Secure Boot enabled and you can't see it when everything is "right".

Are you still trying to see the Windows USB or did you try any Linux distribution already? I can see if the Linux you want runs here or also gives me problems.

By the way, can you change that UEFI boot mode? My machine doesn't have that setting, for me it's UEFI or die.

aphanic

Just in case, this is what I did to create the bootable Mint USB before: https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/772511/#Comment_772511

Connedangry

I dunno man. I think it maybe can be done. There is the storage device management with hdd0 and hdd1 and also the select trusted uefi file for executing. I dunno if these are able to help me but it's something i have to look into.

Connedangry

Only tried the windows usb. You think I should try a live Linux boot?

aphanic

The trusted UEFI file for executing should only be relevant when Secure Boot is enabled I think, that may be the way Acer does the key enrollment thing where you tell the firmware which signatures it is to accept as valid and continue executing.

But I can't wrap my head around the fact that you can't even see an USB drive that has a Windows setup in it as an option to boot from. If you have access to a Windows machine we could try something less automatic and more hands on using a smaller Windows live system and using their tools to create the bootable drive.

Make sure you have the USB stick you want to use connected to the machine, then run DiskPart from an admin command prompt or PowerShell, you should reach another prompt reading DISKPART>
Type "list disk" to show the connected disks in the machine, there should be two your internal drive and the USB stick, it's easy the one we have to select because it's bound to be smaller:
I had something else connected too, but the one I'm looking for is the second one, is a 16GB USB Stick. Once you know the one you want select it with "sel disk X" where X is the disk number. Then type "clean", that will erase it all, partition table included (hence why we list them first not to do something we'd later regret haha):
Since the disk is now empty, let's ensure its partition table is GPT so it plays nicely with UEFI and create a partition, "convert GPT" and "create part prim" respectively. The first one may fail if the disk is already set to be GPT, no problem at all:
Now lets format it as FAT32 (I think it'd work for legacy too, but it's a must for UEFI, although for Windows I remember using NTFS in older non-UEFI machines years ago) by typing "format fs=fat32 quick label=Test" (you can put a different label or skip that parameter altogether):

That last input, "assign" was just in case there was no drive letter assigned to that partition so it would show up in the File Explorer. The opposite is "remove" which removes any existing access point to the partition (sometimes it's needed to be removed before it's formatted, think of it as unmounting that partition).
At this point we should have an empty drive, FAT32 formatted. Now, let's copy all of the contents of a Windows installation image or the Live environment I left here yesterday. It's smaller and doesn't have much, but serves for our purpose. Windows is smart enough to be able to mount ISO images now so double clicking the file ought to mount it as another drive in the File Explorer, simply copy all of its contents over to the USB stick.
Done, reboot the machine and see if there's a new entry in the F12 (I think it is) menu. And now that I think of it... some fancy USB ports are not connected directly to the PCH, for example in older machines that had USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports you'd be able to boot off of the USB 2.0 but not the others, I wonder if it still applies...
If all goes well, booting off of that drive should lead you to this screen:

It's all diagnostics stuff mostly, it was just for a quick diagnosis so I didn't bother making it pretty haha, to exit the environment right click the dock and quit, it should reboot the machine.

I'm curious as to why the machine doesn't see bootable drives and if is because of the USB port you're plugging the drive into I'm going to laugh so hard because I hadn't thought of that until I was writing this answer :facepalm:

aphanic

Connedangry said:

Only tried the windows usb. You think I should try a live Linux boot?

Yep, give it a shot, let Rufus set up the options by default when you pass it the image and make sure the Target system is set to UEFI (non CSM), that was a compatibility mode although who knows maybe it even works for you.

With Secure Boot disable a Linux USB made for UEFI systems should work fine, should, because it's clear it doesn't for some reason. I'm trying to replicate the problem here by the way, even though it's a different model I'm sure the UEFI implementation is similar.

Connedangry

Mate, I've had a ruff day and I'm extremely grateful for you taking your time to help me but I've had a few beers now to cool off lol. I'm pretty sure I tried all 3 USB ports with the windows iso. At this point I need Abit or r&r 😂. I'll do the windows format and mount tomorrow and check all USB again. Hopefully your not busy tomorrow. You must work for Acer? They should hire you if not...

aphanic

I don't work for them haha (I wouldn't mind, if anyone's reading though :P), but to be honest I just got myself my first laptop of the brand. I do like to tinker with these things and help people out if I can.

But yeah don't worry at all, get some rest, there's plenty of time to see what can be done and I'll be around at one time or another. Speaking of which... I should call it quits for today too, it's almost 11PM here haha.

Connedangry

Honestly I'm not a novice but the Acer guys were like school children compared to you. I see a bright future for you young man. 👍

aphanic

Connedangry said:

Honestly I'm not a novice but the Acer guys were like school children compared to you. I see a bright future for you young man. 👍

Thanks for that!

And just in case I learned something today that could be relevant to you too, while in UEFI mode (since I don't have the legacy one) it's not possible to boot 32-bit stuff, even if Secure Boot were disabled.

I was banging my head against the wall because of that little diag thing I made, even when properly copied to the USB stick as usual and all it wouldn't appear in the boot menu. It did on other machines (different brands) but not here, and then it hit me, what if it was because of it being 32-bit?

And there it is, switched over to a 64-bit Windows base and the drive appeared as usual. So if you're still trying with Windows make sure it's a 64-bit release (the 32-bit ones do have EFI bootloaders too, but the firmware seems unable to use them), as for Linux, I tried a couple of distros more and they all worked as long as they supported UEFI (some required Secure Boot to be disabled though).

EDIT: This would be the link to the new image, Rufus default options work (all 32-bit exclusive stuff had to go though because in that env. there's no support for them): https://mega.nz/#!wAU2TSRC!wiKXzlynzkzvpg4azPgg_CaLEfqba25AumA-Rjmdihk

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