Hi everyone - my first post here - I love your work and love Debian.
I ran the Debian installation from debian-live-12.5.0-amd64-cinnamon.iso four times trying different things, because I could not get it to boot.
I used the partitioning option - "Erase the disk" to make sure the installation does all the right things, but it failed, it won't boot. It may be a problem running a disk that's > 100GB, mine is 120 GB. To me, it looks like the bios can't reach the boot partition if it is at the end. This is a known problem on old BIOS from what the Boot Repair disk reports.
The boot error screen it gets to looks odd to me, not the normal BIOS stuff I'm used to, it shows something about F1, F2 to boot to BIOS setup, and F5, I can't remember. But basically, BIOS can't find a partition to boot from.
My solution was as follows:
1 Run the installation with manual partitioning and create the boot partition at the start of the drive, not the end.
2 Installation completes, but it still will not boot.
3 Run Boot Repair (boot-repair-disk-64bit.iso) with the default fixes
Now it works.
I would love the Debian install to be as effortless as possible and avoid having other users ditch the distro because a clean install does not work (I nearly had to because UEFI and secure boot is still an impenetrable black box to me).
My system is a Dell WYSE 7040, BIOS version 1.23.0, disk SK Hynix SC311 128 GB. The system is from 2018/07/04.
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