My attempted installation of ubuntu 24.04.1 keeps freezing on my Aspire E 15 E5-532

motorstar

I used a Ventoy USB flash drive to attempt an Ubuntu installation on my Aspire E 15 E5-532-P4YC. Secure boot was turned off and Legacy was set in Bios. The Installation got fairly far (to the point of wiping Windows off the HDD) then froze. Every attempt to to redo the installation ends with the process freezing at some point in the installation. I've searched the archives but nothing quite matches my problem, and I lack the expertise to dig further into this on my own. Any help would be appreciated.

This is an older laptop which wasn't being used much due to its extreme slowness! At this point, of course, we can't use it at all! I installed Ubuntu on my wife's old Dell desktop a while back and that seems to work well so I'm guessing from this and from some of my reading that this is a problem with some Acer laptops.

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/720695/my-attempted-installation-of-ubuntu-24-04-1-keeps-freezing-on-my-aspire-e-15-e5-532

Make sure that you have the last Aspire E5-532 bios, go here @ HelpDrivers as they have 61 files for Acer Aspire E5-532 laptop and its last bios version 1.23, so if you don't have this bios version installed, then do so as that could be an issue with the Linux installation and why its freezing. also make sure that the old HDD is not faulty and causing the freeze, use another HDD. Good luck and hope this assist you further.

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billsey

My first question is why did you disable Secure Boot and UEFI? Any reasonably modern version of Linux doesn't need that… Just set the EFI file to trusted and you should be good to go. Give that a try instead of setting a Legacy boot. Your drive is really likely too big for legacy to work well.

motorstar

Hi billsey. I disabled boot and went to Legacy after reading a number of posts on various forums and sites that stated this should be done for the install to work well. I should point out that Ventoy automatically disables "secure boot" as part of its startup. I turned UEFI back on but the install still freezes up.

Hi StevenGen. I have downloaded the 1.23 Bios onto a flash drive and have to figure out how to download it to the laptop.

Thank you both for your answers and I'll see where this leads me.

billsey

You pretty much need to do the BIOS update from a Windows environment… According to the Ventoy site "Secure Boot was supported from Ventoy 1.0.07. This option is enabled by default since 1.0.76." That means there is no need to reconfigure for the old style MBR drive format. I see that Acer has removed drivers for this model from their site, since it shipped with W8.1 in 2015 it just too old. It's Braswell based, so likely doesn't need IRST drivers, which would cause a Linux install to have issues. The symptoms where it fails when first trying to write to the disk sure sounds like an issue with the drive though. Did it generate the MBR format the first time or is the disk still in GPT?

motorstar

Well, the BIOS screen shows a GPT partition line so I would guess that it's still GPT. The first installation attempt, as I mentioned, wiped Windows from the HDD so I don't really have that environment to work with. I have been able to reach a point in the installation on a couple of attempts where I can "try" Ubuntu but I don't know it very well so I wasn't sure where to go next. As you may have noticed, I am a bit weak (gross understatement) in dealing with PC's at the technical level. My previous experience was as a programmer / analyst on an I.B.M. 3190 mainframe using PL/1 and CICS languages. Yes … I'm that old!

billsey

With a GPT configuration on the disk, legacy boot would not have worked, legacy needs that MBR boot block in order to start an OS. That boot block is the vector for a lot of viruses, so it's not a good option these days. And things have changed a bit since those old IBM days. :) So, you need to be in UEFI mode, set that in the BIOS, then set the EFI file on the Linux install flash drive as trusted. If the drive actually works, which is still up in the air right now, the install should proceed fine. Your EFI file is usually located in the /boot/efi partition or folder on the installer. It's probably called something like bootx64.efi.