I was asked to provide assistance on the installation of Linux Mint on Acer laptop due to the End of Life for Windows 10 in October 2025.
The first step was to boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive to check that there was enough free space on the Windows partition for Linux.
Upon that initial boot, Linux could not “see” the NVME SSD hard drive.
A bit of googling suggested that fast boot and secure boot might be the problem.
It took some fiddling to get those turned “off” in the UEFI Settings, and in fact I had to do some of it using BCDEDIT in adminstrator mode in Windows.
Even after all that I still needed to tweak the storage controller mode in the UEFI Settings. But I still couldn’t “see” that option in the UEFI.
When I tried booting Linux using Compatibility mode I saw the boot messages flashing by and noticed a reference to RAID – and that was a clue that the Storage Controller Mode needed to change.
Then somewhere deep in a forum message I noticed a reference to CTRL-S inside the UEFI Settings.
I tapped CTRL-S and lo and behold the setting for Storage Controller Mode popped up. I changed it to AHCI and on the next Linux Boot the Hard Drive was visible.
The install went well after that, but when I was showing how to boot Windows from the GRUB menu, Windows seemed to think that it was a bit broken. It took a few restarts for the “so-called” repair to complete and when it finally did boot to Windows, I noticed it was in Safe Mode.
I’m pretty sure I could have eventually got it to boot in Normal mode, but time was starting to become of the essence.
So the Acer laptop was packed up and left with dual boot now on the Acer Laptop.
Unfortunately, most of these issues were the result of Windows trying to lock itself in on the computer with secure and fast boot, but it is a bit daunting for people not used to seeing UEFI Settings pages and having to tweak stuff to get the operating system and hardware recognized.
I offer this to you as a caveat for Linux installation. Unlike you I’ve run into a number of glitches doing Mint installations all a bit different. But each one adds to my knowledge base.
I suspect that in the lead up to October we might be doing many more installs on a wider variety of brand names and configurations. So, experience with these various idiosyncrasies might be helpful.