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.