Re: UEFI grub install fails
Van Snyder composed on 2025-08-17 12:31 (UTC-0700):
> 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.
Did you try using the installation media to boot the installed system?
Did you try booting the UEFI BBS menu (F12 on most Dells) to see what it offers?
> 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.
So grub works, but can't find the config file it expects. Try booting in UEFI
rescue mode and running to show here:
sudo efibootmgr -v
ls -gGh /boot/grub/
Also, mount /dev/nvme0n1p8 somewhere and show here output from that location from
ls -gGhR <location>
If able to boot installed system from installation media, and the ESP contains a
suitably populated debian directory[1], it may be sufficient to use efibootmgr to
create an entry in UEFI NVRAM if there isn't one already there:
sudo efibootmgr -c -L "debian" -l '\EFI\debian\grubx64.efi'
[1] e.g. (absent encryption; others too with)
> ls -gGh /<mountpoint>/debian
-rwxr-xr-x 1 152K Aug 10 16:38 grubx64.efi
>
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