The Beelink SER5 is a popular series of mini PC that I recently acquired to use as a home PC.
Specifications
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500U (6 cores, 12 threads)
- GPU: AMD Lucienne
- RAM: 16GB DDR4
- Motherboard: AZE SER v1.0
- BIOS: American Megatrends LLC. vFP655U508
- SSD: 500GB NVME
- LAN: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet
- USB: Realtek RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
- Wifi: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200
Usage
F7: Get boot menuDel: Get into BIOS
Dual booting with Linux
This was pretty straightforward except for some problems I faced since I had added an extra hard disk that used to be a bootable Linux OS earlier.
Here is what worked:
- Create a Linux installer USB flash drive as described here.
- Restart the mini PC, choose
F7 to get the boot menu and choose to boot from the flash drive.
- Install Ubuntu. Either choose the alongside the Windows boot manager option or you can create an ext4
/ partition and use that. Remove the flash drive and reboot.
- To my surprise, even after installing Ubuntu, there was no Grub boot menu and the system booted into Windows directly. After a lot of frustrations and reinstalls, I finally figured out that I needed to get into the BIOS and place the Ubuntu option higher than the Windows boot manager option in UEFI Boot priorities.
- After that, I was able to see the Grub menu on restart and boot into Linux.
Installing hard disk
There is dedicated space underneath the bottom cover for installing an extra harddisk. Here is what I had to do to install a 1TB harddisk to the Beelink:
- Power off the Beelink, unplug everything and flip it over.
- Remove the 4 screws at the bottom and using the fabric tab pull up the cover gently.
- The harddisk slot under the bottom cover was already connected by a cable to the motherboard.
- All I did was to slide the hard disk or SSD into the slot and press until it locks into the interface inside.
- You can secure it with up to 4 screws provided in the box, but the holes were slightly misaligned with my hard disk so I could not do it.
- Close the cover and screw in. Reboot and enjoy.