Hi,

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 12:42:29PM +0200, Flo wrote:

For me it looks like that the installer thinks that I am on a non EFI
system?

Any ideas?

Yes, it isn't actually booting in EFI mode. I don't think this will be
an issue with Debian because by the time the Debian installer runs the
system has already decided whether it is booting UEFI or legacy BIOS.

Possibly I could be wrong about that, in that possibly your
motherboard's firmware doesn't see the install media as EFI bpptable so
is falling back to legacy BIOS.

I think I'd have another go looking through the BIOS settings to ensure
there's no way it is set to legacy booting or fallback to legacy
booting.

Thanks,
Andy

--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 7/17/25 05:42, Flo wrote:

I tried to reinstall: This time I said guided partitioning the whole
disk but it only creates a 1M partiion for biosgrub and a big one
(3TB) for everything else (+ swap).

That is how it works for me when I boot the installer usb in legacy bios
mode regardless whether EFI is enabled in the bios.

I just now inserted a Debian 12 installer usb and rebooted, making sure
to catch the bios boot device selection screen. It presented me with 9
boot options:

# 6 was "General UDisk 5.00"

# 9 was "UEFI: General UDisk 5.00"

My other 7 boot options are irrelevant to this.

If I boot the 6th option and install Debian it will install like you
described above. If I boot the 9th option and install Debian it will
create, among others, an efi partition mounted at /boot/efi that will
not be empty.

If I did not have EFI enabled in the bios then my boot device #9 would
be missing from the above list.

--
Thank You!

Titus Newswanger
Curtiss WI

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thu 17 Jul 2025 at 12:42:29 (+0200), Flo wrote:

I tried to reinstall: This time I said guided partitioning the whole
disk but it only creates a 1M partiion for biosgrub and a big one
(3TB) for everything else (+ swap). I have EFI enabled in BIOS and
it's not the first time I install Debian on this machine and it
created a EFI partition last time. Also when I chose the use of the
partion, there is no entry with EFI or ESP.

For me it looks like that the installer thinks that I am on a non EFI
system?

That's a very simple thing to answer: if you're in EFI mode,
there will be a directory /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
with files in it. In BIOS mode, there won't.

In the installer, you'll need to open a shell with Alt-F2
and take a look.

PS: the keyboard & mouse problem disappeared after another reinstall,
but booting is only possible over the BIOS menu.

Like John Doe, no idea what this means.

Cheers,
David.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 12:18:50PM -0500, David Wright wrote:

On Thu 17 Jul 2025 at 12:42:29 (+0200), Flo wrote:

but booting is only possible over the BIOS menu.

Like John Doe, no idea what this means.

I took it to mean that OP sees a firmware message like "F11 to see boot options" and presses that, rather than allow the firmware to boot the
order of things it is set to boot from, which apparently fails.

Thanks,
Andy

--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)