On Thu 27 Apr 2023 at 10:18:56 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote: > On 26/04/2023 22:57, Valentin Caracalla wrote: > > the issue with the BIOS boot interface (see my original posting) is still > > unsolved > > I had impression that there was no issue with booting in BIOS (legacy, > compatibility, CSM) mode, of course when it is chosen in firmware/BIOS > setup (requires disabling of secure boot).
Well, the OP wrote: "Previously, I've successfully installed Debian using official installation media on this machine (also using BIOS boot interface), so I know that it works in principle. But now I want to do it using command line utilities like debootstrap and grub-install." But: "the problem is that the ESC boot menu doesn't show an entry for (the model name of) /dev/sda, so I can't boot into it." My first question would be whether it makes a difference to use [F2] and enter the BIOS/CMOS, rather than [ESC] to get just the boot list. As you could read in another thread, I have been testing the d-i installing on a BIOS machine, using a spare partition, in order to see how it behaves with and without a BIOS Boot partition. However, blanking the entire internal drive on a machine just for this exercise is pushing things a bit too far, sorry. And I'm not sure that results from one of /my/ machines would be particularly useful either. They are either native BIOS booters, or have a compatibility mode that just works, without requiring anything out of the ordinary configured for a GPT disk in BIOS mode. That might not be true for your Asus UX31A. At this point, my action would be to install in BIOS mode using your two methods, conventional d-i and debootstrap, and run bootinfoscript (from package boot-info-script) on each, to look for differences. I would avoid doing any UEFI booting between these runs. Cheers, David.
