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I have been trying to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 on Acer Aspire E1-522, AMD Quad-core A4-5000 (1.5Ghz) for three days now. I have a simple notebook with no CD/DVD drive, so I am using a USB stick for it and I used this USB boot creator tool. The tool seems to work fine as Windows recognizes the USB stick as a Ubuntu install. I checked the md5 hash.

I was able to boot the USB stick in EFI mode (following the Ubuntu help wiki page), but after a while in the Ubuntu typical loading screen I get to a terminal text screen with some "kernel panic" stuff and saying that it's "going back to text mode" or something like that. The problem is that after that nothing happens (need to force shutdown).

I tried disabling UEFI and then boot the computer with the USB stick normally, but then after the typical loading screen I get a white screen with nothing and no options (need to force shutdown to leave, also).

I have tried Ubuntu 12.04.4 in both Legacy mode and EFI mode and always I get to the white screen (after Ubuntu loading) without any further option (except forced shutdown). I also tried the 13.10 version, but the result was the same.

I thought maybe it was a distribution problem, so I tried Linux Mint 16 (which is based on Ubuntu, but anyway) and also OpenSUSE. None of them worked. Mint X server crashed (at least I got to a terminal, but that was not what I wanted). OpenSUSE only got me more kernel panic text and I also needed to force shutdown.

Zanna
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marcelocra
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1 Answers1

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In order to be able to avoid the white/black screen and get to the live cd I needed to do two things:

  1. Disable UEFI (I couldn't just disable Secure Boot in my machine), so no Ubuntu in EFI mode for me.
  2. Start the installer with two boot parameters: nolapic and nomodeset

In EFI mode I couldn't pass those parameters to the boot, so I was locked to the white/black screen. In the BIOS mode there is an easy way to pass the parameters, and so I could get to the installer and install. The problem is that now I need to choose the system by choosing either UEFI or BIOS, but at least I got both systems running.

Zanna
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marcelocra
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  • So, if I may ask, which Ubuntu version is working? Is it implement to all versions? I'm thinking of migrating to 14.04 LTS (currently using 12.04 LTS), but I was force to hold on because there's this UEFI problem that causes a spike of failure reported. – user220402 May 14 '14 at 03:57
  • Actually I gave up not long after that, until I discovered I way to disable Secure Boot on my machine (which was not mentioned anywhere). Then I could install Arch with EFI enabled with no headaches (but those intrinsically related to Arch :) ) and haven't tried Ubuntu again. To figure whether you should try it or not I would point you to this and this. Hope it helps! – marcelocra May 15 '14 at 01:09