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I want to use a new motherboard with an old disk. The disk has just one partition, with Debian/jessie installed. On booting, Debian is found and begins to start up with usual dmesg output lines. After the line

Begin: Waiting for root system ...

the system hangs a while, then writes

Gave up waiting for root device.
...
ALTERT!  /dev/idsk/by-uuid/... does not exist.
Dropping to a shell!
...
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

Next attempt: I booted from a Debian netinstall CD into rescue mode. When executing a shell, the disk was found. I then reinstalled Grub to the disk. However, on rebooting from the disk, the above behavior hasn't changed.

Joachim W
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    Your computer boots like: *firmware* > *(maybe) bootloader* > *kernel exec* > *initramfs* > *(maybe) switch_root* > *done*. You get as far as *initramfs* - and so you're almost home free - but the primary job of *initramfs* is to disentangle the kernel from mounting your root device - it bundles its own in memory, basically. So in *initramfs* a tiny linux environment tries to locate and `mount` your final root device. It likely interprets that device to be some value stored in `grub.cfg` that `grub` passes to the kernel as a parameter. You need to change that somehow. I hate `grub`. – mikeserv Dec 20 '14 at 22:27

1 Answers1

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The new motherboard runs UEFI, while the old one had BIOS. Hence I needed to install grub-efi instead of grub-pc.

Joachim W
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  • Thanks to Warren Young and mikeserv who pointed me to looking deeper into grub. – Joachim W Dec 21 '14 at 11:30
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    With UEFI you can do without `grub` entirely - and would probably be a lot better off for it. It's what the first *(maybe)* is about up there - your UEFI firmware *comes* with a bootloader. `grub` is not only needlessly complex in that case *(as was always the case on BIOS systems)* it is also *completely redundant*. Maybe [read this](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/146803/52934) if you're curious. – mikeserv Dec 21 '14 at 14:21