How To Reinstall Debian Or Repair Install

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Starting with Windows 8 most Desktop PC have EFI as firmware instead of the legacy BIOS. If your EFI based PC is not booting debian, here is an easy way to reinstall grub-efi, the bootloader used by debian on these PCs.

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  1. Troubleshooting

To reinstall grub, you need either a live CD/USB to access your current system , or you can use the rEFInd boot manager on a live CD/USB to boot your current system.

Using the rEFInd rescue media

At the author's web page http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html, you will find updated direct links to all sorts of packaging. To boot from a rescue media, select either the CD iso or the image for USB stick, most firmware offers the choice nowadays. If choosing the latter make sure to follow the instructions in the readme. It is recommended to read the author's web pages to get a better understanding of what you are doing.

Boot your computer with the Refind media

Refind will parse your hard drive for installed kernels, and provide you a graphic menu to boot them. Choose your Linux Kernel and boot it.

Reinstalling grub-efi on your hard drive

Check that the computer booted in computer in EFI mode:

After starting a root shell ( if you boot from a live media, you should start a chroot shell instead, as explained in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing#via_ChRoot ) check that your EFI system partition (most probably /dev/sda1) is mounted on /boot/efi. If the /boot/efi directory does not exist, you will need to create it.

Reinstall the grub-efi package

Some of the required fixes are also made in this update with many security and network enhancements. It is compatible with all SATA drives with all the basic necessaries a computer system need. Windows XP Professional SP3 has all the preloaded drivers for SATA drives. Overview of Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3Although Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP but still it is widely used across the world because of its fast speed and reliability. Windows xp sp3 iso compressed programs download

Put the debian bootloader in /boot/efi and create an appropriate entry in the computer NVRAM

Re create a grub config file based on your disk partitioning schema

You should check afterwards that:

Check 1. the bootloader is existing in /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi

Check 2. the nvram entry was properly created.

You can now reboot, and Grub should greet you.

Troubleshooting

If after this steps you're not booting, the EFI of your PC might have some bugs.

Problem1: Weak EFI implementation only recognizes the fallback bootloader

The uefi firmware refuses to boot the debian/grubx64.efi bootloader, and so we have to hijack the uefi fallback boot loader. See http://mjg59.livejournal.com/138188.html for details.

Using debian installer in rescue mode, /dev/sda1 being the FAT32 ESP partition, /dev/sda2 the root partition

Once booted into your normal Debian, tell grub to ensure the fallback boot loader up to date. To do that, run the following:

Note: The above command will permanently hijack the fallback boot loader, which might be undesirable in dual-boot setups.

How

Problem2: EFI boot entries disappear after reboot

The uefi firmware did not create a proper boot entry in NVRAM. This has been seen in a Lenovo Thinkcenter M92Z. The symptom for this will be a missing HD path after the debian entry in the efibootmgr --verbose output.

You can then try to install Refind as your bootloader in the hard drive, following the steps at this gist: https://gist.github.com/EmmanuelKasper/9590327.

CategoryBootProcessRescueLive