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, I did more checking and found that this system does not support master boot record booting as the two drives are two terabytes and from what I have read that size does not support the master boot record option. The windows drive does not have an efi partition but the first drive with debian does. I am now trying to find an accessible way to create a windows bootable usb stick which so far I have not been able to do yet as etcher acts like it is not for this purpose and woeusb is not packaged in debian as pipx install wants the gtk development libraries which were not installed with build-essential. I had someone look and no windows boot manager exists in the f7 boot menu but it just takes me back to the top of the list of boot drives and etcher created drives do not boot. What other options can I do to fix this setup? Nick Gawronski
----- Original Message -----
From: Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>
Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024 08:14 AM
To: Nick Gawronski <nick@nickgawronski.com>;debian-boot@lists.debian.org
Subject: 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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