Although I also worked at Sun Microsystems as Ian Murdock (the founder of Debian Project) did, I worked mostly with windoze systems afterward. But now, like for so many other windoze users, I can't go beyond W7.
After doing some research, I decided to opt for Debian, mainly because it is said to be stable and with lots of options in terms of packages (apps). I sure will be with both W7 and Debian in a dual boot system for the time being during this transition phase. And, hopefully, I will be able to install my W7 within a VirtualBox on top of Debian sometime later on, to minimize the threats from outside.
I fear I'll have a very steep learning curve ahead, though. But I love these kind challenges and, despite not being any tropical cool breeze, I'd rather face it than the dreadful M$ W10 and its descendants.
Going to the point:
My current system is a 64 bit W7 Pro OS, i3-4170 CPU @3.70 GHz, 16 GB RAM, and with the latest updates possible as of now (Jan 2020).
The original primary HD was a WD 500 GB, which I replaced by a 1.5 TB to make sure I have room enough for both OSs. A second NTFS formatted 4 TB data HD is installed with all my personal data, including Dropbox folder in auto sync setting. UEFI with BIOS legacy compatibility is setup in the UEFI-BIOS settings.
Before anything else I run a chkdsk /f (just to be sure W7 is in good shape), made a W7 Repair Disk CD, and the last thing before starting the Buster install I made an WindowsImageBackup, just in case, which was saved in the D: 4 TB data drive.
I started the install process using the latest debian-10.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso from a USB stick done with the latest rufus-3.8, and followed the recommendations set on the "Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide-January 12, 2020".
By pressing F12 I get the menu where, among other options, I have the same USB stick listed twice: one regular and another one starting with UEFI. I chose the latter, as is the settings in my UEFI-BIOS setup, and I do not want to lose access to my 4 TB data HD.
As per the Installation Guide above (3.6.3 - Systems with UEFI firmware), I have never configured "secured boot", so no need to worry about disabling it.
The 1.5 TB HD has already the following W7 partitions:
#1 System Reserved 217 MB NTFS (System, Active, Primary partition)
#2 W7Pro 287.83 GB NTFS (Boot, Crashing dump, Primary partition)
Swap partition was set on the 2nd 4 TB data drive:
#3 partition of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sdb) as swap
All others on 1st (sda) Logical 128 GB as ext4 each but:
- #3 Primary 128 MB as ext2 for /boot
#5 Logical 256 MB as ESP for /boot/efi
#7 Logical 128 GB as xfs for /home
Next screen advises to boot manually with the /vmlinuz kernel on partition /dev sda6 and root=/dev/sda6 passed as a kernel argument.
But sda6 is my logical 128 GB / (root) ext4...
I was able to finish the install process, though, and upon exiting it, taken to the GRUB prompt:
Code: Select all
grub> ls
(proc) (hd0) (hd0,msdos13) (hd0,msdos12) (hd0,msdos11) (hd0,msdos10) (hd0,msdos9) (hd0,msdos8) (hd0,msdos7) (hd0,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1) (hd1,gpt3) (hd1,gpt2) (hd1,gpt1) (hd2)
Which I did, but no output seen. And never had a chance to open a terminal and type grub-install/dev/sda, as advised above...If you are in grub rescue mode, then run these commands to reconfigure grub:
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set root=(hd0,msdos3) set prefix=(hd0,msdos3)/boot/grub insmod normal normal
Nothing else could be done, so I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. And the only thing I got was a blank dark screen saying "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key_" if trying to boot Debian... No W7 option to boot to, nothing at all...
So I inserted my W7 Repair Disk on the P4 Atapi driver to fix/recover the Windows Start Process and... Voila!... I was presented with the Windows Boot Manager to choose Windows 7 or Debian GNU/Linux-continue with install process.
At this point I booted Windows and I'm back to business as usual for the time being.
My questions are:
1. what I did wrong?
2. What am I missing?
3. Should I forget about UEFI / Grub install?
4. Forget my 4 TB data disk where swap partition is set up?
Your help on this very much appreciated.
Thank you so much for any advice and support to address this issue.
Please, feel free to ask me any additional information.