So, I recently swapped out my laptop's SSD to a smaller 1TB, with the intention of single booting Debian only, without Windows. The ultrabook is Dell XPS 13 9360.
The partition layout is simple, I manually created it in Parted Magic before installing from the Bookwork netinstall iso. It consists of an efi system partition, a boot partition, followed by partitions for root, home, and swap, with some unallocated space at end of disk for SSD overprovisioning. Partition table is GPT. The drive is a newly bought Samsung 980 NVMe, but I doubt it's playing a role in the issue.
The install went normally and without obvious errors. But at the end I rebooted, only to see a small text message saying that no bootable devices are present. In the BIOS, there were no UEFI entries. In Parted Magic, all partitions look fine and are populated with what seems to be the appropriate files (kernel, initrd, efi files, root filesystem, etc). I also noticed that that efi partition had a Debian directory, but no fallback bootloader (EFI\boot\bootx64.efi) that all BIOSes should find if there are no valid entries. At this point, I can go into BIOS and manually add an entry pointing to Debian's GRUB efi file and be done with it, but I'm more interested in what the cause is. I can also boot Debian from an external helper tool, like Ventoy or a rEFInd CD iso.
When dualbooting with either Windows 10/11, most of the time the installer would generate a valid entry, but not in a few cases. With Debian alone, an entry never gets generated no matter how many times I've tried. And regardless of manual partitioning vs automatic. I know that there is nothing wrong with the installed OS since it can be externally booted, so reinstalls aren't necessary, they were only done for testing.
I think if the Debian maintainers would default to additionally installing a fallback bootloader efi file, this issue would be very rare or nonexistent. Windows does it by default, and so do a lot of other distros. I do believe the fallback bootloader is officially listed in the UEFI Specification as a way to mitigate buggy/inconsistent BIOSes. Surely they must have a valid reason for not doing so, on top of the Debian directory in the efi partition. Or default to installing a fallback bootloader only if it doesn't exist already, to avoid overwriting an efi file placed by another OS.
The partition layout is simple, I manually created it in Parted Magic before installing from the Bookwork netinstall iso. It consists of an efi system partition, a boot partition, followed by partitions for root, home, and swap, with some unallocated space at end of disk for SSD overprovisioning. Partition table is GPT. The drive is a newly bought Samsung 980 NVMe, but I doubt it's playing a role in the issue.
The install went normally and without obvious errors. But at the end I rebooted, only to see a small text message saying that no bootable devices are present. In the BIOS, there were no UEFI entries. In Parted Magic, all partitions look fine and are populated with what seems to be the appropriate files (kernel, initrd, efi files, root filesystem, etc). I also noticed that that efi partition had a Debian directory, but no fallback bootloader (EFI\boot\bootx64.efi) that all BIOSes should find if there are no valid entries. At this point, I can go into BIOS and manually add an entry pointing to Debian's GRUB efi file and be done with it, but I'm more interested in what the cause is. I can also boot Debian from an external helper tool, like Ventoy or a rEFInd CD iso.
When dualbooting with either Windows 10/11, most of the time the installer would generate a valid entry, but not in a few cases. With Debian alone, an entry never gets generated no matter how many times I've tried. And regardless of manual partitioning vs automatic. I know that there is nothing wrong with the installed OS since it can be externally booted, so reinstalls aren't necessary, they were only done for testing.
I think if the Debian maintainers would default to additionally installing a fallback bootloader efi file, this issue would be very rare or nonexistent. Windows does it by default, and so do a lot of other distros. I do believe the fallback bootloader is officially listed in the UEFI Specification as a way to mitigate buggy/inconsistent BIOSes. Surely they must have a valid reason for not doing so, on top of the Debian directory in the efi partition. Or default to installing a fallback bootloader only if it doesn't exist already, to avoid overwriting an efi file placed by another OS.
Statistics: Posted by Enigma83 — 2024-05-03 23:27 — Replies 0 — Views 35