Install Linux on Acer Aspire 7

I bought my first laptop, an Acer Aspire 7 (Aspire A715-75G) in 2020. It has been the most powerful piece of hardware (i5 9300H, GTX 1650, 16GB RAM) I own till now and I mostly used it for games and content heavy work.

Previously I used a 2nd hand thinkpad x250 running Endeavour OS for daily needs, but have now parted ways with it, because travelling with multiple heavy laptops is a pain. Windows with WSL2 is nice and I still use it, but the comfort of a device running Linux for programming tasks is hard to match.

The process for installing Linux on this device was not straight-forward. So I am documenting the steps I took to enable dual boot, for somebody’s (perhaps myself too) reference in the future. The following steps are necessary since SSD might not appear during installation phase of the Linux based OS on devices which have Intel RST.details.

Steps

1. Boot into Windows, open cmd (not powershell, why idk though) in Admin mode. Then, run the following command to boot into Windows safe mode from next boot.

bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal

2. Reboot computer, open BIOS using F2 key, disable fast boot
3. Visit Main tab of BIOS, press Ctrl + S to enable editing SATA option
4. Change the SATA operation mode to AHCI
5. Reboot into Windows. Windows in Safe Mode should be loaded.

If step no. 1 is skipped, rebooting into Windows give you the Blue Screen Of Death. Ensuring safe mode boot, enables installing of necessary drivers for AHCI after entering that mode.

1. Run cmd again in admin mode and set Windows to boot normally.

bcdedit /deletealue {current} safeboot

7. Now for every reboot, windows 10 can load up normally. Also, the storage device would be now available in options during the OS installation.