I have a new ACER 5336 laptop with 4 gig RAM and preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. The reason for the laptop is because my wife wanted her dining room back!
I had a Desktop PC previously and had been dual booting Win XP with either Linux Mint or Ubuntu. I hadn't made up my mind which one to use yet.
Now my new laptop will not load either Linux distro. Acer tells me that their own proprietory BIOS will not allow dual booting. Nor is one able to load Linux as a single operating system.
I am not quite ready yet to abandon Windows entirely (though Windows 7 has upset me greatly).
Has anyone any ideas?

Hi there,

that's technical nonsense. Once the boot manager (e.g. GRUB) kicks in, the BIOS is out of the game.

That's particularly weird. Doesn't it boot the Live CD or installation CD? If not, how did you get Windows installed? What about installing a real OS, and Windows in a VM?

Same here: I'm still using Windows XP on one machine, and Windows 2000 on another. But I refuse to use that crap that came after XP. That's when the guys in Redmond finally managed to migrate me away from Windows.

[X] Doc CPU

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Have you looked at the partitioning scheme on the Acer? Some manufacturers are selling systems with 4 primary partitions. Then you can not add a partition.

If you have Partition Magic ( windoze ) or one of the freeware bootable live CD's have a look at the partitioning. Parted Magic comes to mind.

My daughter bought a HP with a 500 gig disk, and windbloze 7. Big C drive, there was a drive with diagnostics, and two hidden primary drives.

It took me some time, I made an image with Clonezilla, of the diags, and deleted the partition. Then I shrank C to a reasonable size. I could then make an extended partiton, and in there created a partition for diags. I put the image back, and proceeded to add extended partitions as she needed.

I would be surprised if Acer would borke the BIOS so you could not dual boot. If you can get into the BIOS, see if you can set the DVD or CD as a boot source, and, if you can set up a boot from USB. New systems should support both.

You could always load linux on a USB stick and boot that.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks all of you. I note that Acer has three partitions, one of which is hidden another specdific to acer add-ons etc. and the primary partition containing Win 7 and everything else. I do have Paragon Hard disc suite 2011 but I haven't dared use it to create another partition given the fact that the Ubuntu and Linux Mint discs will not get past the initial menu on boot up.
I did consult Acer support and they were unhelpful. Here is their reply:
Thank you for contacting Acer UK.

We regret the inconvenience caused to you.

We understand you are trying to install an alternative operating system. We do not recommend or support the installation of any other Operating Systems than the pre-installed one. Downgrading/ installation of other operating systems may lead to compatibility issues

It is recommended to take a backup of the default operating system using e-Recovery management, before you make any changes to it.

However, we have a dedicated department who can help you with software related issues as we do not have enough expertise in resolving this issue. So, we request you to contact premium support line on 0906 706 8000(UK) calls cost (50 p /Min). If all technicians are busy on calls with other Customers you will not get connected. So, we request you to try again later.

If you are non UK resident, please contact a local technician.

In order to assist you in future, please provide us the following details:

• When and where did you purchase the product?

For further assistance please do not hesitate to e-mail or contact us on 0871 760 1000 (UK), 0818 202 210 (Eire).

You will be able to install Linux on your Acer but you will need to do some work to achieve the desired result. My 1st recommendation would be to use a LiveCD or LiveUSB (LiveUSBs are much quicker) to check for compatibility issues with hardware. Then once you are satisfied with Linux decide what parts of of pre-installed Windows you are willing to sacrifice. I would do a full clone of your hard drive just for peace of mind sake using something like CloneZilla. If you have an external drive available it would be easy enough to copy the clone over to it.

There is another issue no one has mentioned and that is one of warranty. Are you willing to fore go the warranty on your Acer by installing removing parts of the pre-installed system and/or installing an non-standard OS?

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The first thing to do is follow what Acer support said:

"It is recommended to take a backup of the default operating system using e-Recovery management, before you make any changes to it."

Make it a priority to burn these disks,.
Once you do this you have disks that will restore your factory settings, no matter what you do, and can be very helpful if you suffer a hard disk failure.

Once you have done this you are free to experiment. I would suggest Parted Magic which can usually be found on LinuxTracker
http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?pa...ve=1&tracker=0
as a torrent file.

Download the iso file to create a bootable CD. This may also prove to be a helpful check of your system as this is a linux system and I have yet to find a machine that cannot boot it.
This should help you to re-size and create a suitable partition for your installation.

I do not think that a manufacturer could or would consider creating a bios that was OS specific.

If you are still having problems, consider buying a cheap hard drive and installing this in your machine (this will definitely invalidate your warranty) and seeing if you can install to this.

1 members found this post helpful.

It would be better to make an image of the system using something like clonezilla because the recovery disc that you create on an acer does not restore MBR, the only 1's that do are the actual factory recovery discs.
I used clonezilla and made a few images of my system which I restore to different hdd's to test & they work.

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Why not just buy a replacement hard drive for $30-50 for linux and not worry about all of this recovery software? There's nothing like being able to swap the HD out for the factory one and instantly be running the factory system if need be, without having to fuss with recovery software and backup discs that can be finicky, lost, or corrupted.

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I believe the OP wants to preserve warrantee of machine

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Swapping the hard drive won't void the warranty, you don't have to break any seals to do it (at least not on any laptop I've ever seen). I've even had warranty work done after swapping the drive, they just said to swap the OEM drive back in, and if it still has a problem it's obviously not the drive and they'll cover it (that was Dell).

If anything, swapping out the drive should be less of a warranty issue than reformatting or re-partitioning the drive and installing a new OS (and in my experience, it is), because if you start modifying the OEM drive it can be quite difficult to get back to the full OEM configuration where the manufacturer would feel comfortable warrantying it. If you swapped out the drive completely it only takes 2 minutes to go back to 100% OEM.

Things like RAM and hard drives don't break your warranty, that's why there aren't any warranty seals on the covers for them (again, at least not any laptop or desktop that I've ever seen). As long as you put it back to OEM, so the manufacturer can be sure that your changes aren't what's causing the problem, the warranty is not affected in my experience.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you - all of you. This is truly a community. I shall study all the suggestions and see which is likely to succeed. For what it is worth, both the linux mint and ubuntu distros I have were downloaded and burned according to all instructions. Both discs work fine on my old desktop PC which is a "Heinz 57" developed and improved over several years.
The main symptom is that the booting succeeds up to the point of selecting which operating system to load, after which the screen goes black and nothing further happens.
I have just used Paragon Hard disc suite to create a second partition on the disc. At presen it is formatted NTFS but Paragon is capable fof formatting to various linux file systems though I don't know which to use.
Thanks once again. I will keep in touch.

I can only agree with you about Acer 5336 laptop with windows 7. I don't have a problem with Acer (nice laptop) and I am happy with Win 7 but I do also like Linux (Mint/Ubuntu/DSL and others). I tried to dual boot on the Acer but it didn't like it. Got to first screen on Mint, press enter and then goes to a black screen and stops. Got blank screen on Ubuntu totally. Must be the way Acer configure their OEM installation of Windows.

Not all is lost as I have an HP 7300 laptop which does dual boot, Mint(very nice and clean OS...like it alot) and Ubuntu (another excellent OS). I am happy except for the dreaded Broadcom wireless not working on both (This seems to be problem for alot of users when booting up the new versions of Mint and Ubuntu but not to worry as I think I have the workaround for that.