Re: major booting issues for a totally blind user trying to boot debian 12.6 and windows 10 pro 64 bits on different drives with uefi booting
Hi Nick,
On 22/10/2024 at 17:32, Nick Gawronski wrote:
During the installation grub told me that it can modify the
nvram to have grub boot into debian by default but I told it no as I am
totally blind and had someone set the uefi boot order so that the windows
drive was booted first.
That's not exactly how it works. Either you accept to update the NVRAM
and the installer will register Debian in EFI boot variables and set it
first in the boot order, or you do not accept and the installer will not
even register Debian in EFI boot variables, making it unbootable unless
you forced the installation of GRUB in the "removable media path" and no
valid EFI boot entry exists.
Now when I reboot I hear the grub beep and no
windows option and os-prober is running as it told me that it could not
detect any other operating systems during installation. I did some
reading and it appears there is an esp partition that contains the efi
boot files which only exists on the first nvme drive with debian and no
windows efi files exist.
Do you mean that the Windows drive does not have a EFI partition ? And
its partition table is MSDOS, not GPT ? Then it means that Windows was
installed in legacy (BIOS) boot mode, so it is normal that os-prober
does not detect it, GRUB for EFI would not be able to chainload it anyway.
If the UEFI firmware allows to select "BIOS/CSM/legacy boot" only or has
a boot menu which allows to select Windows' drive (legacy boot), then
you should be able to boot Windows. For dual boot with GRUB you have
three options:
- install GRUB for BIOS (grub-pc) in Debian and boot Debian in BIOS mode
- reinstall Debian in BIOS mode
- convert Windows from MBR+BIOS to GPT+UEFI with mbr2gpt.exe.
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