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?
Not entirely certain where the issue is coming from, but for most laptops the install should finish without all of the drivers just running in the included minimal set. If you can finish the install you should be able to do drivers after that and it should all be happy.
That said, an alternative is using a virtual machine. If you only use a few programs this may be a much more reliable and stable way to run Windows apps without messing with dual boot and drivers etc. The Virtualbox install is super easy and drivers are installed using the guest tools iso, so it is really simple to have fairly good graphics performance with limited overhead. You can also snapshot the image and have a known working state before updates, so if they gank something during the update you can just roll back and put off the update. Very handy for mission critical tools.
Are you sure the ISO you downloaded is ok?
Do you have access to another Windows PC you could create the install drive from using the official tool instead?
Did you wipe everything to install Windows with a “fresh” machine or you’re trying to install it while keeping Linux?
I had this with a scratched DVD, therefore a corrupted image. Said image should be self-sufficient by now, and if it isn’t it’s probably incorrectly read in the process. Try just copying the contents of ISO to your installation drive and restart the installation.
On the off chance this is a Ventoy quirk, have you tried writing the ISO directly to the USB and booting it?
Haven’t needed driver disks in years, so if that doesn’t work, my guess is its a Acer Thing.