While trying to move my computer to Debian, after allowing the installer to do it’s task, my machine will not boot.

Instead, I get a long string of text, as follows:

Could not retrieve perf counters (-19)
ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x00000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B08 conflicts withOpRegion 0x0000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B0F (\GSA1.SMBI) /20250404/utaddress-204)
usb: port power management may beunreliable
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
amdgpu 0000:08:00.0 amdgpu: [drm] Failed to setup vendor infoframe on connector HDMI-A-1: -22

And the system eventually collapses into a shell, that I do not know how to use. It returns:

Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
 - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait lomg enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)

Alert! /dev/sdb2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

The system has two disks mounted:

– an SSD, with the EFI, root, var, tmp and swap partition, for speeding up the overall system – an hdd, for /home

I had the system running on Mint until recently, so I know the system is sound, unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning. Under Debian, it booted once and then stopped booting all together.

The installation I made was from a daily image, as I am/was aiming to put my machine on the testing branch, in order to have some sort of a rolling distro.

If anyone can offer some advice, it would be very much appreciated.

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    This gives a little bit of credence to the theory of an old installation taking precedence.

    • Are there other EFI partitions around? Try booting explicitly from each one and see if you get different results

    • Are there old bootloaders or entries from no longer existing installations lingering around on yor EFI drive? Move them from a live env to a backup or just delete them if you are confident.

    • How about NVRAM? It’s a way for the OS to configure boot straight to your mobo; separate from any disks attached. It doesn’t look like it to me but perhaps it is possible your mobo is still trying to load stale OS from NVRAM config and your newest installation didnt touch it? Manually overriding boot in BIOS like above should root out this possibility.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      I developed the habit of formatting my disks before a new install, so I’m going to push that hypothesis aside for now.

      Before installing Debian I tried Sparky and I noticed it had set up a /boot_EFI and a /boot partition, which sounded off to me, so I wiped the SSD clean and manually partioned it, leaving only a 1GB /boot, configured for EFI.

      NVRAM is not completely off the board but I find it odd to just flare up as an issue now, under Debian, and having no problems under Mint or Sparky.