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   翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 01-Dec-2025 12:11:30 JST 翠星石

   in reply to

   • Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged)
   @taylan >Have issue.
   >Depend on proprietary software and SaaSS.
   Debian assumes you depend on a proprietary UEFI, but if BIOS boot is used instead, then removing UEFI GRUB and ensuring that the GRUB shim in MBR and the rest of GRUB is installed in /boot correctly will ensure the system will boot (i386 `grub install /dev/sda` will reinstall and tell you if GRUB is installed correctly).
   • Embed this notice
     Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged) (taylan@fedi.feministwiki.org)'s status on Monday, 01-Dec-2025 12:11:31 JST Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged)

     in reply to

     • Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged)
     I've tried to get help from all three of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. All of them said a bunch of stuff that seemed half made up, but at least gave me a couple commands with which I could find out the details in my previous post.
     
     With each LLM, I created a fresh chat and listed all those facts and told them to diagnose the situation. This time all three said pretty much the exact same thing:
     
     The system was originally set up with legacy BIOS booting, but for some reason the Debian package for EFI-based GRUB installation was pulled in. This is likely an error in the automated "installimage" tool of Hetzner.
     
     It appears to be a relatively benign situation, that probably just means GRUB isn't getting updated properly. The quick fix is to install the `grub-pc` package, uninstalling the efi ones.
     
     Won't touch anything before getting confirmation from Hetzner though.
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     Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged) (taylan@fedi.feministwiki.org)'s status on Monday, 01-Dec-2025 12:11:32 JST Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged)
     I'm not sure if my server's bootloader is in a working state after upgrading to Debian 13.
     
     During upgrade, I saw it say "cannot find EFI directory" and "WARNING: Bootloader is not properly installed, system may not be bootable". The same appears again if I run `dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64`.
     
     However, manual probing of the disks appears to indicate that legacy BIOS mode is used, not UEFI, and that GRUB is installed in the MBR of both disks. (It's a software RAID 1 setup, so it's installed on both in case one fails.)
     
     But if the system uses MBR GRUB with legacy BIOS booting, then why is `grub-efi-amd64` installed, and not `grub-pc`?
     
     Scared of rebooting. Guess I'll open a Hetzner ticket and see what they say.