Boot Issues – Fixing ‘Loading Initial Ramdisk’ Hang on MSI GE63 with Ubuntu 18.04

I've been trying to get Ubuntu 18.04 LTS running on my new MSI GE63 Raider. I can get into the live USB by passing acpi=off and then running the installer. After that, I install the proprietary nvidia driver (nvidia-driver-390). Also I have tried installing nvidia-prime and bumblebee. I've also blacklisted nouveau.

The issue is that I cannot for the life of me get it to boot without passing acpi=off, because otherwise it hangs at a purple screen. When trying in recovery mode with any of the included kernels (4.15.0-20 and 4.15.0-29) I can see it hangs at

Loading initial ramdisk.

In addition to the above I tried passing following parameters in GRUB:

• acpi=ht
• acpi_osi=
• acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"
• acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Linux"
• nomodeset
• nogpumanager

… and a couple more (I forget after trying so many)

The specs of this laptop are:

• intel i7 8750h (6 core)
• nvidia gtx1060m
• 16gb of RAM
• 256gb ssd (which holds the windows 10 partition and the "/"
• 1000gb hdd (which holds the data for windows and "/home"

The BIOS settings are set to UEFI. Fast boot and secure boot are both disabled. I've also tried switching off Intel speedstep and c-states, both to no avail.

Also, I have tried to install Debian 9, Lubuntu 17.04, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Deepin 15.5 and Mint 18, all of which need the added acpi=off flag.

Does anyone have any advice for this?

Thanks in advance!