Linux Mint 18 and UEFI boot manager

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Serg Serg 3 years ago in Acer, linux, Mint, UEFI, Uncategorized 0

Recently I was installing Linux Mint on a new Acer laptop with UEFI boot manager. The laptop came with preinstalled “Endless OS” which turned out to be useless because of absence of a package manager. I’ve created Linux Mint 18.3 bootable USB using Rufus, and chosen “GPT partition scheme for UEFI”. I did not make any BIOS changes before installation, and the installation procedure worked fine; I’ve chosen “Erase the entire disk” option during installation. After the installation, when I tried to launch the newly installed OS, I’ve got “No Bootable Device” screen. After several “try and error” iterations I came with the following solution:

  • During installation, do not check “Install 3rd party drivers …” option – the drivers will not be installed anyway; they can be installed later using Driver Manager.
  • After the installation is over, boot into BIOS settings (on Acer laptops by pressing F2 key after switching power on) and set the EFI file created during installation as trusted. The procedure is written in much detail here, only in my case the file turned out to be grubx64.efi
  • The system should boot now, but without some drivers. The worst thing in my case appeared after installing Oracle’s Virtual Box – Virtual Box installs it’s own kernel driver, and Virtual Box did not work because the driver did not work. So you need to enable driver installation now, and it is done by disabling “Secure Boot” option in BIOS.