Dual boot AN515-57

I recently purchased a Nitro 5 AN515-57-51RC from BJ's Wholesale Club. I need to have a CentOS7 Linux machine for my work and I liked the Windows gaming aspects of this Nitro 5.

So I've been trying hard to set it up for dual boot for the last two days. Is it possible to do this? About a year ago, I had a lesser Nitro 5 and was eventually able to set it up to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux. I remember the dual boot setup being difficult to setup and almost gave up on it. Eventually I read of something involving ACHI. I was able to follow those instruction and afterwards it was a fine dual boot computer.

But this one seems a little different. I haven't found any references to ACHI Mostly, when I try to install CentOS7, it doesn't see the partition I set up for it by shrinking the Windows partition. I even tried adding a second SSD and mostly it didn't see it either except for one time when after some BIOS changes, it could see both the partition on the original HDD as well as the second HDD. The installation process seemed nearly ready to complete, but then it said the resulting installation would not be bootable and did I want to continue. I eventually did continue and ended up with a computer that showed the Windows no boot device error, but eventually the Acer recovery corrected the Windows problems. However, I still didn't have dual boot and when I tried to install CentOS7, it couldn't see either the partition on the original SSD nor the added SSD at all again.

Is it possible to get this to work? Has anyone here done it? What steps should I follow?

(Thread was edited to add model name to the title)

Accepted answers

AnhEZ28

@brucecichowlas firstly, open the msconfig, boot tab and enable the safemode. Then, go to the BIOS, press Ctrl+S in the main tab and disable VMD controller. Save and exit. Once you have booted in to safemode, restart and again to go into normal Windows state. You now should see the partitions for installing CentOS

Commodore_1995#

Did you create a password in setsupervisorpassword and disable secureboot too?

All comments

AnhEZ28

@brucecichowlas firstly, open the msconfig, boot tab and enable the safemode. Then, go to the BIOS, press Ctrl+S in the main tab and disable VMD controller. Save and exit. Once you have booted in to safemode, restart and again to go into normal Windows state. You now should see the partitions for installing CentOS

Easwar

Hi @brucecichowlas,

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/dual-boot-windows-10-other-versions-windows/

brucecichowlas

AnhEZ28 said:

@brucecichowlas firstly, open the msconfig, boot tab and enable the safemode. Then, go to the BIOS, press Ctrl+S in the main tab and disable VMD controller. Save and exit. Once you have booted in to safemode, restart and again to go into normal Windows state. You now should see the partitions for installing CentOS

It was going great! It got to the point where I was installing Centos7 (after restarting after safemode) and at the end of the installation, I got a message that I've seen before:

The following error occurred while installing the boot loader. The system will not be bootable. Would you like to ignore this and continue with installation?

Failed to set new efi boot target. This is most likely a kernel bug. No Yes

I've had this message happen before. I think one of the times was when I was trying to install Alma Linux rather than CentOS 7. I don't recall what I replied or what I did, but at some point I could actually boot Alma Linux. However, Centos7 is what I really need to run.

What would you suggest now, @AnhEZ28 ? You seem to know what you are talking about. Thanks.

Commodore_1995#

Did you create a password in setsupervisorpassword and disable secureboot too?

brucecichowlas

Thanks, @egydiocoelhoand @AnhEZ28. I didn't do exactly what either of you said, but benefited from both. As I mentioned, I had tried @AnhEZ28 's suggestion. That seemed to go pretty well, but left me with that dialog about the resulting disk being unbootable. So earlier today I searched for "The system will not be bootable" on the web and that turned up a number of different ideas. Some involved marking a file as safe and some involved some grub work and other commands that I didn't completely understand. Meanwhile, I was getting ready for another run at it, undoing the supervisor password I had set and doing other things, trying at each stage of the way to see if it could then boot to CentOS7. I also installed a second SSD of 1TB size, hoping that it would be easier for the installer to work with, since it was fresh and mostly unallocated. (As it turned out, that didn't help it be spotted by the installer. I found that if the installer could see it, the installer could also see the space on the first drive and vice versa.)

I had pretty much undone everything when I saw the message from @egydiocoelho . I had just finished removing the supervisor password, but I put it back. Also, I discovered I was in secure boot mode, but maybe that was as a result of undoing things. I don't recall whether I was in secure boot when I did what @AnhEZ28 said. Possibly I wasn't and, maybe if I had gone into secure boot mode, @AnhEZ28's answer would have worked perfectly.

But I thought that I should try what @egydiocoelho said from whatever state I was in, so I put back the supervisor password and selected secure boot. That was enough to let the installation be found (bottom of an F12 list) and I could still run Windows 11, too. I'm probably going to leave the BIOS stuff just as it is, because I don't like to poke at something that is working and that I don't understand well.

My CentOS7 installation has some other problems, like no WiFi, but I solved that once before on a similar system with a script that (surprisingly) did some commands that started kill... , commands that I copied directly from an internet posting. I copied them down someplace and maybe they will work for me here, too.

The other weird problem is that when I go into the Gnome "Files" app, I thought it would show my 1TB second HDD, to which I did the installion, as the main volume of approximately that size, but instead I seem to have a lot of partitions much smaller that that. Oh, well. I will figure those things out, but I'm glad to have it booting and need to step away and so some other things for a bit.

Commodore_1995#

I am happy for your success. Now, about the wireless network card, it would be interesting for you to inform the exact model.

brucecichowlas

egydiocoelho AnhEZ28. I didn't do exactly what either of you said, but benefited from both. As I mentioned, I had tried @AnhEZ28 's suggestion. They seemed to go pretty well, but left me with that dialog about the resulting disk being unbootable. So earlier today I searched for "The system will not be bootable" and that turned up a number of different ideas. Some involved marking a file as safe and some involved some grub work and other commands that I didn't completely understand. Meanwhile, I was getting ready for another run at it, undoing the supervisor password I had set and doing other things, trying at each stage of the way to see if it could then boot to CentOS7. I also installed a second 1TB SSD, hoping that it would be easier for the installer to work with, since it was fresh and mostly unallocated. (That didn't help it be spotted by the installer. I found that if the installer could see it, the installer could also see the space on the first drive and vice versa.)

I had pretty much undone everything when I saw the message from @egydiocoelho . I had just finished removing the supervisor password, but I put it back. Also, I discovered I was in secure boot mode, but maybe that was as a result of undoing things. I don't recall whether I was in secure boot when I did what @AnhEZ28 said. Possibly I wasn't and, maybe if I had gone into secure boot mode, @AnhEZ28's answer would have worked perfectly.

But I thought that I should try what @egydiocoelho said from whatever state I was in, so I put back the supervisor password and selected secure boot. That was enough to let the installation be found (bottom of an F12 list) and I could still run Windows!!, too. I'm probably going to leave the BIOS stuff just as it is, because I don't like to poke at something that is working and that I don't understand well.

My CentOS7 installation has some other problems, like no WiFi, but I solved that once before on a similar system with a script that (suprisingly) did some commands that started kill... commands that I copied directly from an internet posting. I copied them down someplace and maybe they will work for me here, too.

The other weird problem is that when I go into Gnome "files", I thought it would show my 1TB second HDD, to which I did the installion, as the main volume of approximately that size, but instead I seem to have a lot of partitions much smaller that that. Oh, well. I will figure those things out, but I'm glad to have it booting and need to step away and so some other things for a bit.

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