After successful-seeming install, boots to grub-rescue CLI??

It took me about five tries to get the right combination of partition settings for /boot/efi, /, /home, and swap (label failed on swap the first time, etc.) on my Thinkpad T430 (Core i5 2.9 GHz, 16 GB RAM, ~300 GB platter drive with Win10 and previously Kubuntu 22.04, partitioned with 50 GB for /, ~28 for swap, and 160+ for /home) to get installation to complete. Once it did, I may have done something I shouldn't have by removing the USB stick before shutdown was completed, but that shouldn't damage anything on the hard disk, right? After hard restarting, I checked that the USB stick was okay (goes as far as the normal GRUB screen, at least), then restarted to Debian 12.7 KDE -- except now I'm looking at a grub-rescue command prompt. The error message above that reads "file 'boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod' not found."

I reformatted the old Ubuntu EFI boot partition, wiped the Ubuntu / and swap partitions and reformatted them, and kept my old /home.

Where did I go wrong? I need to know this before I install on my desktop machine, which has more than 1.5 TB of data that I don't have the resources to back up.

I booted the laptop back to the Live session (guess the USB image isn't damaged, anyway), and I find that boot partition (3 GB) contains an EFI folder, which contains boot and Debian. The boot folder is empty, while Debian contains BOOTx64.CSV, fbx64.efi, grub.cfg, grubx64x.efi, mmx64.efi, and shimx64.efi. Seemingly relevant, there is no boot/grub folder. Would update-grub from a chroot to the installed device fix this?

Statistics: Posted by Silent Observer — 2024-11-29 00:44 — Replies 8 — Views 137

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