Not getting anywhere, I'm afraid. I finally realized, after reading the links, that what I needed was
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebia ... SSD/jessie under the section at the bottom titled, oddly enough, Solve Problems with GRUB, Disk not-Seen and Black Screen. When all else fails read the instructions.
But I ran into problems right away.
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Run a shell (for example: boot live USB ->Advanced ->Rescue mode
That takes me to a list of choices, one of which is "Exit to a shell". I assume that's what they mean. But when I do that, I get a message saying (if I remember right) that /root is now in RAM and a /target dir is already made. So what do I do with the first instruction:
? Doesn't make sense that they'd want me to make another identical dir.
Then came commands some of which seem optional:
// this worked fine & partition I want to install grub-efi on is *I think* the / partition, nvme0n1p2, not the EFI one nvme0n1p1
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cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p<X> cryptrootlvm // I don't want encryption. assumed I didn't need this
pvscan // scans all disks for physical volumes (necessary) // ran this but it returned nothing
vgchange -a y // this activates the volume group
// do I need a volume group? don't know what it is, Assumed no, so didn't run this
lvdisplay // useful to determine <XXX> below // returned nothing. so I used /dev/nvme0n1p2,see under fdisk -lu
mount /dev/<XXX>/root /target
//I used: mount /dev/nvme0n1p2/root /target
that mounted what looked like / on /target.
However, I never had the feeling any of it made sense, so I have no idea what I was doing. Confusion reigns supreme. I have used chroot once or twice before, but then I had a clear idea which system I was chrooting *from* and *to*.
Then I went ahead and ran the rest of the commands:
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mount --bind /dev /target/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /target/proc
mount --bind /sys /target/sys
cp /etc/resolv.conf /target/etc
chroot /target /bin/bash
then:
apt-get update
apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
update-grub
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/nvme0n1
All those commands looked like they worked normally, but as I say, I'm not sure *where* I was actually running them. Then it says
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Exit the shell, choose "Continue without bootloader" and the system should boot.
I had to exit twice to get all the way back to Rescue, I selected "Continue without bootloader" ......... and, no. It wanted to reinstall the whole damn system. So I let it do that, but boot still fails. Whatever I did, I did not fix EFI.
I'm pretty sure when it continued without bootloader it was loading the LiveUSB. There's no way to unmount it, so I finally tried just yanking it out, but without the liveUSB it's just back to the black screen & choose media dialog.
I know I'm doing something stupid wrong, but what?
Also, if I just reformat the entire drive, is that likely to help? Or to turn my X1 into an expensive brick?