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Reinstalled debian not booting

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roncrump
Posts: 8
Joined: 2014-12-08 08:53

Reinstalled debian not booting

#1 Post by roncrump »

Hi,

I made a bit of a mess of my upgrading my system recently - in my defence I was ill and really not with it (too out of it to even realise it was a bad idea to do it when not paying attention) - and it wouldn't boot, not even into recovery mode. Just a blank screen with a blinking cursor. So I decided to do a reinstall.

I created a Debian 11.3.0 Live USB, booted it, backed up the user directories and then used the Calamares installer to install debian. It took me a few goes before it would install (I didn't reformat the old root partition so it couldn't unpack files into there).

Anyway, got to a point where it is installed, but not booting. After a message about missing i915 firmware (i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin), it drops into initramfs. If I just exit this then a get another message which looks possibly more helpful:
ALERT! /dev/mapper/orac--vg-root does not exist. Dropping to a shell.
and then returns to initramfs.

I named the root partition root, so I believe it had orac-vg/root displayed in Calamares on the summary screen.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron.

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NorthEast
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Re: Reinstalled debian not booting

#2 Post by NorthEast »

You may, or may not have more success with the netinst image if you can install over the internet. In my experience it's been more reliable than the live image. You might consider whether LVM is useful to you. Depending on your needs, it may be an unnecessary extra layer of software over standard partitioning. On the i915 messages about the graphics driver, I regularly receive these sort of messages on upgrades but they do not appear to have any affect but I do have the firmware-misc-nonfree installed which carries a goodly sum of i915 firmware.

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FreewheelinFrank
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Re: Reinstalled debian not booting

#3 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

I would boot into your live USB and check out the file system to see where you have gone wrong.

Code: Select all

# lsblk
might be a start.

My guess is in reusing the old file system you formatted the root partition as a logical volume but your boot partition doesn't know about this or does not have the required tools to deal with it.

Possibly fixable by somebody who understands these things (I don't); probably identifying where you went wrong and reinstalling (with the correct partition formatting?) is going to be easier, as it's a fresh install anyway.

roncrump
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Re: Reinstalled debian not booting

#4 Post by roncrump »

Thanks both.

That's given me some things to try.

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