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.

  • qyron@sopuli.xyzOP
    4·
    16 hours ago

    @mvirts@lemmy.world @kumi@feddit.online @wickedrando@lemmy.ml @IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz @angband@lemmy.world @doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml

    Update - 2026.01.12

    After trying to follow all advices I was given and failling miserably, I caved in and reinstalled the entire system, this time using a Debian Stable Live Image.

    The drives were there - sda and sbd - the SSD and the HDD, respectively. sda was partioned from 1 through 5, while sbd had one single partition. As I had set during the installation. No error here.

    However, when trying to look into /etc/fstab, the file listed exactly nothing. Somehow, the file was never written. I could list the devices through ls /dev/sd* but when trying to mount any one of it, it returned the location was not listed under /etc/fstab. And I even tried to update the file, mannually, yet the non existence of the drives persisted.

    Yes, as I write this from the freshly installed Debian, I am morbidly curious to go read the file now. See how much has changed.

    Because at this point I understood I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my attemps, I opted to do a full reinstall. And it was as I was, again, manually partitoning the disk to what I wanted that I found the previous instalation had created a strange thing.

    While all partions had a simple sd* indicator, the partition that should have been / was instead named “Debian Forky” and was not configured as it shoud. It had no root flag. It was just a named partition in the disk.

    I may be reading too much into this but most probably this simple quirk botched the entire installation. The system could not run what simply wasn’t there and it could not find an sda2 if that sda2 was named as something completely different.

    Lessons to be taken

    I understood I wasn’t clear enough of how experienced with Debian I was. I ran Debian for several years and, although not a power-user, I gained a lot of knowledge about managing my own system tinkering in Debian, something I lost when I moved towards more up-to-date distros, more user-friendly, but less powerful learning tools. And after this, I recognized I need that “demand” from the system to learn. So, I am glad I am back to Debian.

    Thank you for all the help and I can only hope I can returned it some day.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      It wasn’t for nothing, you got some learning out of the experience and a story to tell. Good luck with the new system, maybe hold upgrading that to testing for a while, there’s plenty to break and fix even without extra quirks from non-stable distribution :)

      Have fun and feel free to ask for help again, I and others will be around to share what we’ve learned on our journeys.