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Can I boot into the EFI shell in order to add a UEFI entry before installing Linux? There won't be GRUB on the Acer laptop initially.
The Acer laptop runs Windows 10.
Once you boot into the EFI shell, add a UEFI boot menu entry:
Shell> bcfg boot add 0 fs1:\EFI\arch_grub\grubx64.efi "Arch Linux (GRUB2)"
where fs1 is the mapping corresponding to the UEFI System Partition and \EFI\arch_grub\grubx64.efi is the the from the --bootloader-id from the grub-install command above.
This will temporarily add a UEFI boot option for the next boot to get into Arch. Once in Arch, modprobe efivars and confirm that efibootmgr creates no errors (no errors meaning you successfully booted in UEFI mode). Then GRUB#UEFI systems can be performed again and should successfully permanently add a boot entry in the UEFI menu.
reference:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB/EFI_examples
not specific to archlinux
1You are already linking to an article which has specific paragraphs for different hardware from the same manufacturer. The answer is that you will probably be able to install Linux but the parameters might be different. – Seth – 2016-12-14T09:36:18.777