Re: How do I reinstall grub-efi?

[Gary Dale <gary@extremeground.com>]

On 2025-08-12 08:10, Max Nikulin wrote:
> On 12/08/2025 04:26, gary wrote:
> > I gave up and resigned myself to a clean install of Debian 13. 
> > However that also failed to provide any relief, as grub refused to 
> > install on the boot device.
>
> Is NVRAM boot entries on your headless machine points to proper 
> partitions (efibootmgr -v)?
>
> Do you sync EFI System Partitions after updating grub? In Debian grub 
> may update only one ESP.
>
> I would try to put ESP on the USB drive, perhaps with both EFI/BOOT 
> (for removable drives) EFI/debian directories.
>
> Is EFI/debian/grub.cfg points to a proper partition with boot?
>
> If you use secure boot then you may just copy EFI/debian from the 
> machine where you installed Debian to the target machine (or to ESP on 
> the USB drive).

To be clear, the machine that refused to boot was my workstation. I 
haven't even turned on the headless server because I've been too busy 
with this one.

I eventually found the problem (when I was younger, I probably would 
have said it was obvious). Somehow the efi partitions had lost their 
formatting, which is why grub refused to install on them. I fired up the 
KDE Partition Manager, reformatted them, recreated the hook to sync the 
partitions when grub is updated, reinstalled grub and rebooted.

This also fixed the NFS problem. I guess the kernel version difference 
is what was causing the strange behaviour.