Swift 3 Ubuntu Problems Booting BIOS gone?

I want to start by saying for the record I screwed up. I put ubuntu on my Mac in the past and was able to completely reformat and be able to recover it with Mac Recovery Tool. Now When I installed 16.04 I was having issues.

First off I have set to delete everything and do a full install. After that it seemed to randomly be able to boot, maybe 1 in 4 times it booted up. I tried to make some changes and just did another install figuring I messed something up. After that I either was able to log in to a black screen, aside from the mouse cursor, or a purple glitched screen. I couldn't get into anything at all to check the packages or whatever.

When I went into grub to recovery mode I tried changing to nomodeset and some other random stuff etc but that didn't help much. The fsck, dpkg and all the other commands either had errors or ran indefinitely (shut off after over 2 hours of whatever). Once I tried to start for good it freezes on the loading screen.

Part of me wants to install windows again just to have dual partitions but at this point I think I lost that opportunity to get my windows back. Pressing the Alt+F10 command just brought me into BIOS and not anything with windows.

Now I made it worse I think. I tried going off the liveUSB to install again. Went through the full installation process and all the way to the message where I need to remove installation media and reboot. Once I got that far and rebooted I start and get an error message telling me

"Default Boot Device Missing or Boot Failed.

Insert Recovery Media and Hit any key

Then Select 'Boot Manager' to choose a new Boot Device or to Boot Recovery Media"

if I press Ok I go to Boot Manager with the Options

1. Yes

if I select that I get the error again. It appears that my BIOS is gone or something.

Is this normal or did I completely destroy this new laptop? Does anyone have advice??

Accepted answers

All comments

billsey

Yup, you've completely destroyed it. Send it to me so I can throw it away and then buy a new one and start over.

Smiley Happy

Actually there are likely a couple of things going on. The default is to boot from UEFI with non-standard images blocked. When you did the first run through install it wiped all the Windows partitions, including the UEFI partition so it can't find a boot image. You need to reconfigure the laptop to use a legacy BIOS boot and then point that to your grub partition. If the UEFI partition were still there you could probably boot into the UEFI editor and add the grub partition to the boot list after disabling the secure boot stuff.

In the long short run though, Ubuntu might not have motherboard drivers yet to handle the Swift models. You could bump into lots of weird issues, ranging from broken USB ports to overheating without those drivers. Do the Ubuntu folks say they supporting it yet? It might just be better to run Windows with either Linux in a VM or without Linux at all for a year or two until they've got robust support for the new patforms, then do the OS switch.

One of the partitions the install likely wiped was the restore partition and I'm guessing you ignored the users manual when it told you to create recovery disks... Smiley Sad (Actually a recovery thumb drive with the new models, IIRC). Recovery sets are available to US customers on the main Acer site in the shop, same for Candaian customers I think on their site. Other countries you have to contact support and they'll sell the disks/drive to you through their interface.

JordanB

Here's the link that Billsey was talking about if you're in USA to get your Windows.

https://store.acer.com/en-us/extended/recovery/

On some Swift models, a firmware update was required to get Ubuntu installed properly with secure boot enabled.

The link below is confusing so I'm hesitant to post it, but feel free to ask them in the link below about how to install Ubuntu as EFI with secure boot enabled. You should ignore some of the posts as many of them are about workarounds prior to the release of the Insyde h20 update that fixed the problem.

http://community.acer.com/t5/Swift-Spin-S-and-R-Series/Ubuntu-on-Swift-3-SF314-51-74FW-black-screen-after-menu-on-Live/td-p/464481/page/5

Here's a brief summary:

1. Make sure your BIOS/UEFI settings are default (and of course have Windows installed) (You can use Windows Disk Management to shrink your C drive to give you some unallocated space----so you can have room for Ubuntu----give yourself at least 35 GB).

2. Get latest BIOS/UEFI from Acer's website

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers

3. Get updated BIOS/UEFI from Windows Update

4. Go in UEFI settings and set a supervisor password ( and then save/exit)

5. Create Ubuntu USB installation media with rufus (UEFI/GPT/fat32/iso)

6. Go back in to UEFI settings and add Grub to the trusted secure boot settings and also enable the F12 boot menu (and then save/exit).

7. Install 64bit Ubuntu as EFI with secure boot enabled in the UEFI.

Edit: It might be better to ask them in that Swift link rather than to go by my summary as I don't own a swift. And the Insyde H20 update that they received may be something entirely new and my steps might not work. So if you have problems, you should probably ask them in the link I posted.

Quick Links

Top Members

Weekly

Puraw 420

StevenGen 255

GAMING6698 70

RenanVilela 65

Jack22 65

Swift Series Intel^® Evo™

Game Pass

Acer Corner

Gaming on Chromebook

Swift Series Intel® Evo™

Game Pass

Acer Corner

Gaming on Chromebook

Swift Series Intel^® Evo™