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paardenkapper

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 8, 2023
206
130
Germany
Hello all.
I installed Debian 12 i386 on an iMac 5,1 from 2006 with Ventoy.

The install went well and it installed GRUB to /dev/sda but after restarting it does not recognize a bootable drive or OS and displays a flashing folder icon. Booting up with the option key pressed down will show a hard drive labeled "Windows" and I can boot into Debian just fine.

How can I just boot up the drive without having to resort to pressing OPT at boot?

Thanks a lot.
 

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
2,621
5,306
Wisconsin, USA
You'll need to reconfigure/reinstall grub. What happened was during install it usually asks where to install the bootloader. On the rootfs partition or the master boot record. Seems you installed it to the root partition. You want the MBR. You'll have to search the internet for how to do that though as i'm not too familiar with grub.

Cheers
 

paardenkapper

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 8, 2023
206
130
Germany
I may be incorrect but could it be a problem with utilizing a 32 bit EFI and a 64 bit processor (Core2Duo)?

There seems to be some kind of tool called rEFInd I need to look into.
 

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
2,621
5,306
Wisconsin, USA
rEFind is not needed. You aren’t dual or triple booting with other OS’s. It also has nothing to do with the 32bit EFI. You just simply installed grub to the wrong partition (for automatic boot). For dual boot purposes that’s fine, and a safer way to do it, but for single OS use you want to install the boot loader (grub) to the master boot record.
 

paardenkapper

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 8, 2023
206
130
Germany
I may be wrong here again but I think that I gave the drive a GPT partition scheme.
There was no option for me to install GRUB into the MBR but I'll look into that soon, the iMac is currently at work because I used it as a Endpoint for Terminal Computing.
 
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