UEFI grub install fails

[Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>]

I upgraded the BIOS in my Dell Latitude E5470 from 1.19.3 to 1.34.3.

I could no longer boot. So I decided to upgrade from Debian 12 Bookworm to Debian 13 Trixie.

All went well until the end when grub install failed.

I have an EFI partition. It's formatted for FAT32. It has an EFI tag — I told the "partition" step to use that partition for EFI.

I found a twelve year old recommendation to run

sudo dosfsck -r /dev/sda2

but of course I can't do that if it won't boot. So I ran it in a system rescue disk and it didn't complain.

Now when I boot grub gives me an empty screen and wants me to type in all the commands.

I found a page that says "The error has been seen when the /EFI/ubuntu directory is corrupted (bug 1090829)." Of course, I'm trying to install Debian but maybe there's a clue there — if only I knew where to read about bug 1090829.

Is there more modern advice somewhere to get Trixie installed?

Or, can I downgrade my Dell BIOS back to 1.19.3?

— Van Snyder