G’day,
I decided to put Linux Mint on my laptop without dual booting for a while first. I have come to the realisation that I still need Windows but am having a hard time getting an installation happening. I downloaded the official Windows 11 .iso and created a bootable flash drive in Mint. It works but stops when it asks for drivers. Is this a laptop thing or an Acer thing?
Not entirely certain where the issue is coming from, but for most laptops the install should finish without all of the drivers just running in the included minimal set. If you can finish the install you should be able to do drivers after that and it should all be happy.
That said, an alternative is using a virtual machine. If you only use a few programs this may be a much more reliable and stable way to run Windows apps without messing with dual boot and drivers etc. The Virtualbox install is super easy and drivers are installed using the guest tools iso, so it is really simple to have fairly good graphics performance with limited overhead. You can also snapshot the image and have a known working state before updates, so if they gank something during the update you can just roll back and put off the update. Very handy for mission critical tools.
This is as far as I’ve gotten with Ventoy.Are you sure the ISO you downloaded is ok?
Do you have access to another Windows PC you could create the install drive from using the official tool instead?
Did you wipe everything to install Windows with a “fresh” machine or you’re trying to install it while keeping Linux?
I had this with a scratched DVD, therefore a corrupted image. Said image should be self-sufficient by now, and if it isn’t it’s probably incorrectly read in the process. Try just copying the contents of ISO to your installation drive and restart the installation.
On the off chance this is a Ventoy quirk, have you tried writing the ISO directly to the USB and booting it?
Haven’t needed driver disks in years, so if that doesn’t work, my guess is its a Acer Thing.
What i usually do nowadays when doing a fresh intall of windows is by using winNTsetup because it avoids too many steps if you have already decided to nuke the drive. You can download it from majorgeeks or have it preintalled on most portable windows like hirens, dlcboot or medicat.
Edit: oops my bad, sry, i got some bad reading comprehension, youre doing dual boot, ignore what i’ve said.
Dual boot is troublesome, even if you managed to make it work, it could mess your system, like for example, a windows update that could mess your grub partition thats why most people avoid it and use vm instead( qemu, vbox, etc.)
Yeah I did read about updating Windows messing with grub.
I just really want to play some Steam games and use my GPU for blender rendering.
Personally, I really would not advise dual booting because the hassle is not really worth it, unless theyre on seperate drives.
It is because of mbr vs gpt partition and some weird bs from laptop manufacturers
Mbr are mostly on older systems and could only support up to 4 partitions, legacy boot works on this, so if someone decided to add another os, it adds another partition and most likely to jank that persons pc
Gpt is newer, could support more than 4 partitions, runs only on efi, so someone would be like, cool, why not set my drives to gpt instead
Unfortunately, most laptop manufacturers do some bs called instant lock to secure boot if you change to efi boot, the problem with secure boot is that it only works on 1 os, the manufacturer of that laptop already decided that you’ll only run 1 os and its windows, so dual booting on efi is a no go
So if you really need windows in a linux machine is vm, try vm. Most vms support pcie passthrough, (unless acer has some weird implementation).
Or the other way around, nuke your linux then return to windows.
Or if your laptop has 2 drives, then you can go 1 drive linux, 1 drive windows.
Jesus the comments are bad…
You need drivers. Specifically, you need the drivers for your internal disk (probably an NVMe), and/or the USB drivers. You also need to have them in a location where you can reach with Windows Setup. If it’s the USB drivers you need, having them placed loose on the USB install drive won’t help.
It’s not a laptop thing, nor an Acer thing per se. But it is a hardware thing. Microsoft didn’t include the drivers for your exact chips for whatever reason, probably because they were never submitted for approval.
In the end, you’ll probably need to mount boot.wim (and likely install.wim) using DISM, add the drivers, then update the USB drive. I don’t think you can do this without a functional Windows machine.
You might be about to get around some of this by trying different USB ports. Some might have different controllers, and thus need different drivers. This was very common when USB3 was new (e.g. USB2 were Intel and connected to the chipset, while USB3 was an add-on from Marvell and the like)
I recently had this exact issue when creating a bootable USB from the windows .iso under Linux mint.
The only fix was to use a windows PC and the windows media creation tool to create the USB drive.
Oh, I know this one! This occured when I made a bootable Windows USB on Linux. If you use Rufus to make the USB, it works. Rufus is Windows-only, sadly, so you’ll need to vreate a Windows VM first.
