On 2025-08-12 08:10, Max Nikulin wrote:
On 12/08/2025 04:26, gary wrote:
I gave up and resigned myself to a clean install of Debian 13.
However that also failed to provide any relief, as grub refused to
install on the boot device.
Is NVRAM boot entries on your headless machine points to proper
partitions (efibootmgr -v)?
Do you sync EFI System Partitions after updating grub? In Debian grub
may update only one ESP.
I would try to put ESP on the USB drive, perhaps with both EFI/BOOT
(for removable drives) EFI/debian directories.
Is EFI/debian/grub.cfg points to a proper partition with boot?
If you use secure boot then you may just copy EFI/debian from the
machine where you installed Debian to the target machine (or to ESP on
the USB drive).
To be clear, the machine that refused to boot was my workstation. I
haven't even turned on the headless server because I've been too busy
with this one.
I eventually found the problem (when I was younger, I probably would
have said it was obvious). Somehow the efi partitions had lost their
formatting, which is why grub refused to install on them. I fired up the
KDE Partition Manager, reformatted them, recreated the hook to sync the
partitions when grub is updated, reinstalled grub and rebooted.
This also fixed the NFS problem. I guess the kernel version difference
is what was causing the strange behaviour.
