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.
Tbf he said he doesn’t know how to use the terminal, and he’ll need to use at least sudo, vim and cat plus the stuff you mentioned. A drive getting inserted into the disk order is probably the correct thing, I thought UUID was the default on new installs for that reason…
I’d argue that if the plan is to run Debian testing it’s at the very least beneficial, if not mandatory, to learn some basics of the terminal. Debian doesn’t ship with sudo by default, so it’s either logging in directly as root or ‘su’. Instead of vim (which I’d personally use) I’d suggest nano, but with live setup it’s also possible to use mousepad or whatever gui editor happens to be available.
I suppose it’d be possible to use gparted or something to dig up the same information over GUI but I don’t have debian testing (nor any other live distro) at hand to see what’s available on it. I’m pretty sure at least stable debian installs with UUIDs by default, but I haven’t used installer from testing in a “while” so it might be different.
The way I’d try to solve this kind of problem would be to manually mount stuff from busybox and start bash from there to get “normal” environment running and then fix fstab, but it’s not the most beginner friendly way and requires some prior knowledge.
Yes but, not in the first few weeks.
My holistic suspicion is that OP has his home folder on a USB/esata drive and he’s not telling yet.
Edit
Apparently no