Catherine Gramze wrote:
I intend to build a computer for the specific purpose of running Debian. I have had a bad experience with a store-bought computer, which seemed to be wholly unable to boot to anything but Windows 8 - there was no option in the BIOS to boot to the hard drive, or even to the EFI partition, but only to the Windows Boot Manager. Even with Secure Boot turned off. So, I am looking for recommendations on hardware, particularly motherboards, known to play nicely with Debian and boot consistently. Building my own system is not new to me, but something I have not done for 10 years or so, so the appropriate BIOS settings on the new EFI and UEFI mobos are unknown to me. All advice is solicited.
I suggest that in the future take a live CD &/or USB with you. If the store will not allow you to test with it, find another store. I had no problem a couple of years ago doing this when first getting my feet wet. I was looking for a used laptop and there was much discussion of incompatible video. As I had no idea what chipsets I would run into, a LiveCD seemed a reasonable go/nogo test. I don't know how completely this would cover the "secure boot problem".
Just had an idea while writing above [may be based on ignorance]. Could a full install, including Grub, be done to a USB stick such that:
1. grub would be on the USB stick
2. one could boot from USB such that:
a. after initial boot update grub could be run
b. after reboot from USB there would be choice of running either:
Debian from USB
Windows from hard drive
Would it catch all EFI/UEFI/"secure boot" problems? I don't know.
It would be a useful solution to a unrelated situation I have.