I have a Dell T5820 workstation. I had already installed Debian 12 in a spare
partition on a Transcend SSD dating from 2017 using a USB memory stick. I left
in place the existing Windows SSD that came with the workstation. All went well
- a very smooth install. A few weeks later the Transcent SSD failed. Kernel
panic. So I bought another SSD, Kingston, and redid the installation from the
same USB stick.
I probably made two mistakes. 1) I removed the Windows SSD since I never use
Windows. 2) I specified "Force UEFI = No", the default. But I did create a
small FAT32 partition to be mounted on /boot/efi if one day I needed it.
I went through the installation process, and at the end, removed the USB
installation stick and rebooted. The T5820 went into a long BIOS test and then
announced: "BIOS 2.38.0 Build 440.16 UEFI ROM no bootable partition found."
So I re-inserted the USB installation stick to redo the installation. This took
me to the GRUB command line. I typed a few commands: (I have removed all
details of hd1, hd2... reported as No known filesystem detected, or Filesystem
cannot be accessed)
grub> ls -l
Device hd0: Filesystem type ISO9660 - Label 'Debian 12.7.0 amd64 n'
Last modification time 2024-08-31 UUID 2024-08-31-10-43-00-00
Partition hd0,msdos2: Filesystem type fat, UUID DEB-0001
grub> ls
(proc) (memdisk) ... (hd0) (hd0,msdos2) (hd1) ...
grub> ls (hd0,msdos2)/
efi/
grub> ls (hd0,msdos2)/efi/
boot/ debian/
grub> ls (hd0,msdos2)/efi/boot
bootx64.efi grubx64.efi bootia32.efi grubia32.efi
grub> ls (hd0,msdos2)/efi/debian
grub.cfg
grub> cat (hd0,msdos2)/efi/debian/grub.cfg
search --file --set=root /.disk/id/e8185...
set prefix-($root)/boot/grub
source $prefix/${grub_cpu}-efi/grub.cfg
So it looks as if hd0 is the installation USB stick.
I don't understand why the USB stick no longer boots, since it did in the past,
on this same workstation. Is there some way of persuading the USB stick to
continue booting? Any hint or suggestion would be very welcome. I see complex
incantations as cited below, but I don't have the depth of understanding of UEFI
GRUB needed to adapt them to the Debian 12 USB installation stick.
Roger
https://community.frame.work/t/booting-from-usb-only-grub-command-line-no-menu/10605
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/classic-sysadmin-how-to-rescue-a-non-booting-grub-2-on-linux
