On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 05:52:10PM +0000, Russell L. Harris wrote: > On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 07:04:13PM +0200, Sven Hoexter wrote: > > so far I can only confirm that the grub installation fails with > > both stable and testing. It seems something is at odds with writing > > the efivars. I did not yet get around to try again if I can switch > > the installation back to using grub-legacy somehow. > > I would not mind going back to Wheezy, if necessary.
If going back to i386 is an option for you, the department of workarounds has an option. I could install with the i386 non-free bullseye iso from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/bullseye_di_alpha2/i386/iso-cd/ Basically that forces a BIOS mode installation, but be aware grub2 also in BIOS mode does not boot on this device. So what I did was just before the installer asks for your confirmation to reboot I switched to the shell on tty and did roughly the following: mount -o bind /sys /target/sys mount -o bind /dev /target/dev mount -o bind /proc /target/proc chroot /target /bin/bash apt install grub-legacy dpkg --purge grub-pc grub-pc-bin grub2-common update-grub grub-install /dev/sda exit & reboot. That basically replaces the known to not work grub2 with the old grub which already worked in the past. Did not yet move on from here. So in my bug that is so far two bugs: a) the touchpad does not work in the graphical installer b) grub2 does not work in EFI and BIOS mode You can probably afterwards also install an amd64 kernel image so you have a i386 userland with at least a 64bit kernel running. For the sake of random testing I also tried Ubuntu 20.04 and Fedora 32 and in both cases the grub2 efi installation fails as well. Quite sure that is a general issue between the UEFI on this device and grub2 which for some unknown reason worked or was workaround in the old grub. Not sure if that helps you to move on in any direction with this device. Sven