Unable to boot Debian

[napoletano]

Hello, I am brand new to Debian, but not to Linux (8 years as an Ubuntu user), and therefore probably qualify as a beginner. I am having two problems with Debian at the moment that may or may not be related. I will state the problems first, and then describe the system I'm using. The problems are:

1) If I boot using secure boot and UEFI, I end up in grub with the option to boot to Ubuntu or launch the Windows boot manager in /dev/sda1, but no option to boot Debian. However, if boot using legacy boot, I land in what appears to be a boot menu specific to Debian that allows me to boot to Debian or Ubuntu, but does not list Windows as an option. The question is, How do I get all three on one menu, preferably with secure boot and UEFI?

2) When I do boot into Debian, when I select "Debian" as the boot option, the machine just lands in a black screen. I think that the power is still on, but the screen is entirely black, and the keyboard entirely unresponsive. Pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete does not trigger a reboot, and Ctrl + Alt + Fx does not load a TTY screen. The only option is a hard reboot. The odd thing is that Debian worked the first time I booted into it.

Now to explain my system. I have a Dell Inspiron 15 7558 which is a gift from my parents. It came with Windows 10 pre-installed. I hate using Windows, but occasionally want to play a game or need to load a document that won't load in LibreOffice, so I originally cut the Windows partition in half and installed Ubuntu alongside it. The two seemed to play well enough together, but I have been growing increasingly unhappy with Ubuntu since they ditched GNOME for Unity, and I recently decided that I wanted to start exploring other options. Ubuntu took the news hard, but I promised that we'd still be friends. To that end, I re-sized both the Windows and Ubuntu partitions so that the latter has about 400 GB available and the former 200, and I then installed Debian on the new 400-GB partition. The installation went fine, except that the modem doesn't work with the free drivers, and I need to install firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-iwlwifi, both of which I downloaded to a USB device and was going to install once I got into Debian. As it stands, I have Windows in sda3, the Windows boot manager in sda1, Ubuntu in sda6, Debian in sda9, and bios_grub listed in sda8. Here, I'll upload the screenshot from gparted. I searched the forum already, but didn't find anything specific to these two issues. Any help getting things up and running would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

You will need to disable Secure Boot.

Debian will install a UEFI system (from a non-live ISO) but does not currently support Secure Boot.

You can attempt to convert it after installation by following this guide (replace "bunsenlabs" with "debian" in the GRUB path):
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=393

However, that method is not reliable at the moment (it doesn't work if `update-grub` loads additional modules).

I will be updating it in future.

[kiyop]

Boot ubuntu and install boot-info and execute it and post the generated boot-info result.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

As Head_on_a_Stick mentioned, secure boot should be disabled to boot debian.

[napoletano]

I'm sorry, I just came across this post in a search on something else and realized I never followed up! In my defense, this is because someone stole that computer before I could report back. In case anyone else is having this problem, I was able to have all three systems listed as boot options by booting into Ubuntu and executing:

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

I left secure boot disabled.