Can't boot on an ACER Aspire ES-14

[Devilman]

Hello

A collegue brought me her laptop ACER Aspire ES-14 (ES1-432) to fix, she hasn’t used it for quite a while, as it has some strange unfixable Windows issue.

As it is more of a netbook than a “real” laptop, I decided to install Manjaro instead of Windows, as it will be much lighter, safer and more stable (the computer only has a 32Gb eMMc flash drive for the OS, and 2Gb of RAM)… to do so, I used a bootable USB drive.

The installation went well, but the computer won’t boot, “No Bootable Device”, it says.

But, Manjaro is right there installed, I can lauch it by using the “Detect EFI bootloaders” in the Live USB menu, as well as with other software I have on my USB drive, such as rEFInd or Supergrub 2 Disk, the OS is fully functionnal, no problem whatsoever, it just can’t launch without help.

To my understanding, it is an issue of the computer’s UEFI being able to launch only one boot file with a specific name (of course, only for Windows), it won’t launch anything else, even though the file is right where it should be.

I’ve read a solution on an Ubuntu forum (that I can’t find again lol), which consists in renaming Manjaro’s EFI file with the name of the file the computer uses, then overwriting it.

So, I need someone to explain me step by step how to do so.

Thanks

[linux-aarhus]

• Windows changes boot order Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - ArchWiki

[Devilman]

Thank you for the fast answer.

I followed the instructions from the section " UEFI boot loader does not show up in firmware menu" in the provided link :

“Shell> mkdir FS1:\EFI\Microsoft
Shell> mkdir FS1:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot
Shell> cp FS0:\EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi FS1:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi”

There’s now a slight improvement, I haven’t the “No Bootable Device” prompt anymore, but now, I’m stuck in a grub command console, here’s what I see :

"GNU GRUB version 2.04

Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists possible device or file completions.

grub>_"

Note that now, in the UEFI of the motherboard, I can see the “Windows Boot Manager” listed, it wasn’t the case before.

It’s a little step further, but still Manjaro doesn’t launch lol

Maybe there’s another file I must copy instead of the “bootx64.efi”, isn’t there a file that launches the usual Grub menu ?

[Devilman]

Problem solved, this is how :

Manjaro did his work, installing its own .efi file, grubx64.efi, in the Manjaro folder in the EFI partition… so, everything needed is there, but the computer only scans the Microsoft folder, so I did the same thing as explained in my previous post, but with the grubx64.efi file, so here’s the command :

cp FS1:\EFI\Manjaro\grubx64.efi FS1:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi

Voilà, now, the computer boots Manjaro (no grub menu though, but maybe it’s set on “hidden” mode), no need for USB drive anymore

Thanks to linux-aarhus for pointing me the good direction.