Discussion:
major booting issues for a totally blind user trying to boot debian 12.6 and windows 10 pro 64 bits on different drives with uefi booting
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Nick Gawronski
2024-10-22 16:10:01 UTC
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Hi, I have installed debian 12.6 successfully on my System76 Serval WS 11
laptop on the first nvme drive that is two terabytes. On the second drive
I have windows 10 pro 64 bits which is also two terabytes and have two
more drives that are four terabytes in size. All drives including the
windows drive and the other storage drives are mountable and I can access
their data. During the installation grub told me that it can modify the
nvram to have grub boot into debian by default but I told it no as I am
totally blind and had someone set the uefi boot order so that the windows
drive was booted first. Now when I reboot I hear the grub beep and no
windows option and os-prober is running as it told me that it could not
detect any other operating systems during installation. I did some
reading and it appears there is an esp partition that contains the efi
boot files which only exists on the first nvme drive with debian and no
windows efi files exist. I did look in the windows partition and found
lots of .efi files and tried copying bootmgr into another directory
/boot/efi/efi/windows that I created but no luck. What method can I use
to repair this system so I can use the system where debian does not even
touch windows and where I can easily choose the windows boot option or
make it the default as update-grub says nothing about this issue and no
os-prober output is given if I run it as root I just get put back to the
shell? Does debian or another service besides Aira which is paid and does
not really know much about linux exist where I can do a video call or some
type of remote access where they can remote into this linux system to try
to fix windows? Nick Gawronski
john doe
2024-10-23 09:20:01 UTC
Permalink
Post by Nick Gawronski
Hi, I have installed debian 12.6 successfully on my System76 Serval WS 11
laptop on the first nvme drive that is two terabytes. On the second drive
I have windows 10 pro 64 bits which is also two terabytes and have two
more drives that are four terabytes in size. All drives including the
windows drive and the other storage drives are mountable and I can access
their data. During the installation grub told me that it can modify the
nvram to have grub boot into debian by default but I told it no as I am
totally blind and had someone set the uefi boot order so that the windows
drive was booted first.
efibootmgr
Post by Nick Gawronski
Now when I reboot I hear the grub beep and no
windows option
How do you know that if you are totaly blind.
Post by Nick Gawronski
and os-prober is running as it told me that it could not
detect any other operating systems during installation.
You are using multiple disks, so it's likely why Windows is not detected.

Try to boot into Windows using the above CMD.

This list is D-I specific, you will get more traction on debian-user
mailing list.

--
John Doe
Pascal Hambourg
2024-10-23 13:20:01 UTC
Permalink
Hi Nick,
Post by Nick Gawronski
During the installation grub told me that it can modify the
nvram to have grub boot into debian by default but I told it no as I am
totally blind and had someone set the uefi boot order so that the windows
drive was booted first.
That's not exactly how it works. Either you accept to update the NVRAM
and the installer will register Debian in EFI boot variables and set it
first in the boot order, or you do not accept and the installer will not
even register Debian in EFI boot variables, making it unbootable unless
you forced the installation of GRUB in the "removable media path" and no
valid EFI boot entry exists.
Post by Nick Gawronski
Now when I reboot I hear the grub beep and no
windows option and os-prober is running as it told me that it could not
detect any other operating systems during installation. I did some
reading and it appears there is an esp partition that contains the efi
boot files which only exists on the first nvme drive with debian and no
windows efi files exist.
Do you mean that the Windows drive does not have a EFI partition ? And
its partition table is MSDOS, not GPT ? Then it means that Windows was
installed in legacy (BIOS) boot mode, so it is normal that os-prober
does not detect it, GRUB for EFI would not be able to chainload it anyway.

If the UEFI firmware allows to select "BIOS/CSM/legacy boot" only or has
a boot menu which allows to select Windows' drive (legacy boot), then
you should be able to boot Windows. For dual boot with GRUB you have
three options:
- install GRUB for BIOS (grub-pc) in Debian and boot Debian in BIOS mode
- reinstall Debian in BIOS mode
- convert Windows from MBR+BIOS to GPT+UEFI with mbr2gpt.exe.

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