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I have an Acer Aspire F5-572G; and, I recently shrank the volume of my C: drive (running Windows) to create a partition for Ubuntu. I also used Rufus to load Ubuntu onto an external USB drive, which I then used to install Ubuntu on the unallocated partition.

Since then, however, I have been unable to access the Ubuntu distribution installed on my machine. As my image (see "create a partition") shows, the 44.38GB partition containing my Ubuntu distribution appears to be uncorrupted; but I do not know how to access it. I have accessed my UEFI numerous times and sought to change my boot order priority, but in every case, my laptop always boots up Windows.

How do I access the Ubuntu Linux distribution on my machine?

Daniel Chen
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3 Answers3

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Rufus Settings for UEFI Only Ubuntu Install

Note Partition scheme and Target system for UEFI only install.

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C.S.Cameron
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Boot your system from a Ubuntu live-cd.

You would require an active internet connection.

  1. Install Grub. For UEFI installation install grub-efi. For others, install grub2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ( grub-efi or grub2 ) #Based on your installation.
  1. Follow from step 2 from this answer.
hsbasu
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Acer machines appear to all have boot code which automatically looks for a Windows boot directory. I've found you can fool them into thinking they're running Windows, whereas they're actually running Ubuntu simply by a directory copy & one file rename.

This is how I did it,

  1. Make Ubuntu installation USB

  2. Boot from installation USB & install Ubuntu (given choices I prefer to scrub the whole of the hard drive and do minimal install). At this point you'll probably find you get boot fails if you try to re-boot from hard drive

  3. Boot once again from your Ubuntu installation USB and run a Live Ubuntu session

  4. Open a terminal, then go through these steps to copy the Ubuntu boot directory into Microsoft boot directory space

     sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
 cd /mnt
 ls
 cd EFI
 ls
 sudo mkdir Microsoft
 cd Microsoft
 sudo mkdir Boot
 cd Boot
 sudo cp -r /mnt/EFI/ubuntu/* .
 sudo mv shimx64.efi bootmgfw.efi

and hey presto! it boots, and the 'Windows Boot Manager' magically puts 'Windows Boot' (which is now actually Ubuntu 20.04) to the top of the list in the F2 boot menu.

Note: I've got an Acer ES1-132 but suspect most Acer machines are the same

Warning: You may need to run through steps 3) & 4) again if the boot directory changes in the future, but this can be done without loss of data or any need to re-install Ubuntu. This happened to me once in last 4 years.

Steve Crowe
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