G’day,
I decided to put Linux Mint on my laptop without dual booting for a while first. I have come to the realisation that I still need Windows but am having a hard time getting an installation happening. I downloaded the official Windows 11 .iso and created a bootable flash drive in Mint. It works but stops when it asks for drivers. Is this a laptop thing or an Acer thing?
Jesus the comments are bad…
You need drivers. Specifically, you need the drivers for your internal disk (probably an NVMe), and/or the USB drivers. You also need to have them in a location where you can reach with Windows Setup. If it’s the USB drivers you need, having them placed loose on the USB install drive won’t help.
It’s not a laptop thing, nor an Acer thing per se. But it is a hardware thing. Microsoft didn’t include the drivers for your exact chips for whatever reason, probably because they were never submitted for approval.
In the end, you’ll probably need to mount boot.wim (and likely install.wim) using DISM, add the drivers, then update the USB drive. I don’t think you can do this without a functional Windows machine.
You might be about to get around some of this by trying different USB ports. Some might have different controllers, and thus need different drivers. This was very common when USB3 was new (e.g. USB2 were Intel and connected to the chipset, while USB3 was an add-on from Marvell and the like)