While trying to move my computer to Debian, after allowing the installer to do it’s task, my machine will not boot.

Instead, I get a long string of text, as follows:

Could not retrieve perf counters (-19)
ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x00000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B08 conflicts withOpRegion 0x0000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B0F (\GSA1.SMBI) /20250404/utaddress-204)
usb: port power management may beunreliable
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
amdgpu 0000:08:00.0 amdgpu: [drm] Failed to setup vendor infoframe on connector HDMI-A-1: -22

And the system eventually collapses into a shell, that I do not know how to use. It returns:

Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
 - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait lomg enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)

Alert! /dev/sdb2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

The system has two disks mounted:

– an SSD, with the EFI, root, var, tmp and swap partition, for speeding up the overall system – an hdd, for /home

I had the system running on Mint until recently, so I know the system is sound, unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning. Under Debian, it booted once and then stopped booting all together.

The installation I made was from a daily image, as I am/was aiming to put my machine on the testing branch, in order to have some sort of a rolling distro.

If anyone can offer some advice, it would be very much appreciated.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    4·
    3 days ago

    I think everyone here has offered good advice, so I have nothing to add in that regard, but for the record, I fucked up a Debian bookworm install by doing a basic apt update && apt upgrade. The only “weird” software it had was Remmina, so I could remote into work; nothing particularly wild.

    I recognize that Debian is supposed to be bulletproof, but I can offer commiseration that it can be just as fallible as any other base distro.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOP
      8·
      3 days ago

      Debian is well known for its stability but it is also known for being tricky to handle when moving into the Testing branch and I did just that, by wanting to have a somewhat rolling distro with Debian.

      I’m no power user. I know how to install my computer (which is a good deal more than most people), do some configurations and tinker a bit but situations like this throw me into uncharted territory. I’m willing to learn but it is tempting to just drop everything and go back to a more automated distro, I’ll admit.

      Debian is not to blame here. Nor Linux. Nor anyone. We’re talking about free software in all the understandings of the word. Somewhere, somehow, an error is bound to happen. Something will fail, break or go wrong.

      At least in Linux we know we can ask for help and eventually someone will lend a pointer, like here.

      • IcyToes@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 days ago

        OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great balance between stable and updates (rolling updates). Worth considering if Debian doesn’t work out.

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          I’m a sucker for Debian. It was my first good and reliable workhorse. First love is hard to forget.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      And that’s why I immediately fell in love with immutable distros. While such problems are rare, they can and do happen. Immutable distros completely prevent them from happening.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        1·
        2 days ago

        I love them, too. Ironically, I’m not currently running one, but that’s more because I need a VPN client that I haven’t been able to get working on immutable distros, but I’d use one if I that was solved

          • Telorand@reddthat.com
            1·
            2 days ago

            Oh, Private Internet Access. The way it installs itself is wonky on immutable systems (i.e. it was written for mutable systems in an odd way). I remember seeing someone say on the PIA GitHub that there’s a workaround, but I haven’t given that a go, and my own experience trying in the past still led to problems, even if you got the client and daemon working.

            You can utilize the OpenVPN configs just fine, but you lose out on some nice features in the client, like WireGuard and some other QoL things.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
              2·
              2 days ago

              Ah, bummer. Looks like they don’t provide a Fedora repo, otherwise it would have been easy to layer onto Silverblue etc. There’s probably still some way, but I get not wanting to go through that trouble.

              • Telorand@reddthat.com
                1·
                2 days ago

                Yeah, I even tried rolling my own downstream distro based on Bazzite by trying to install it at build time (when they do most of their system changes), but I kept running into trouble either with extracting the files or moving the files where they needed to go.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      3·
      3 days ago

      Nothing that uses apt is remotely bullet-proof. It has gotten better but it is hardly difficult to break.

      pacman is hard to break. APK 3 is even harder. The new moss package manager is designed to be hard to break but time will tell. APK is the best at the moment IMHO. In my view, apt is one of the most fragile.

      • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Eh, I disagree with you on Pacman. It could be possible I was doing something stupid, but I’ve had Arch VMs where I didn’t open them for three months, and when I tried to update them I got a colossally messed up install.

        I just made a new VM, as I really only need it when I need to make sure a package has the correct dependencies on Arch.

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          1·
          2 days ago

          I can almost guarantee that the problem you encountered was an outdated archlinux-keyring that meant you did not have the GPG keys to validate the packages you were trying to install. It is an annoying problem that happens way too often on Arch. Things are not actually screwed up but it really looks that way if you do not know what you are looking at. One line fix if you know what to do.

          It was my biggest gripe when I used Arch. I did not run into it much as I updated often but it always struck me as a really major flaw.

          • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            I feel like it was more than the package manager whining; I think xorg literally wouldn’t start after the update, although it’s been so long now that I could be misremembering.

            Honestly, I probably could have salvaged the install if I’d wanted to without too much difficulty, but it was just a VM for testing distro packaging rather than a daily driver device.

            Still, what you say is good to know, and perhaps I should hold back on the Pacman slander. I’ve just been using Debian for around 4 years now and had pretty good reliability; then again, Debian (and most distros, with their pitiful documentation) would probably be very hard to use without Archwiki.