After an update of Arch last month my OS suddenly didn’t want to boot, anymore. I wanted to switch from Arch Linux to Debian on my private computer anyway and thus took the chance to install Debian. During the installation I stumbled upon a few issues, which I want to quickly take notes about in this post.

Display Problems - just random pixels

First, when I booted the installer, it showed the GRUB boot menu perfectly fine. However, when I selected Graphical Installer or the CLI Installer, it always just displayed random pixels.

It took me a while to find out the solution to this, and it only worked when in my computer’s boot menu I selected “USB: [USB device name]”, not “UEFI: [USB device name]”. The boot menus of the Debian installer look a bit different between those two. In the USB mode (probably falling back to BIOS or something?) you have a menu entry called “Help”. That was missing when I booted the “UEFI: [USB device name]” entry. But “Help” is the solution to the pixel problem. Choose “Help” from the boot menu, then hit F8. Then you see a bit of help. It also shows that you can install with framebuffer disabled with:

install vga=normal fb=false

Running that command fixed the pixel problems for me.

Extremely Slow Installation

Next problem for me was an extremely slow installation. I’ve already had the impression under Arch that the hard disk really struggled when performing package updates. The Debian installation (only the base image) ran one or two hours and was still stuck at 50%. I’m running a RAID1 setup, so two hard disks combined into one virtual disk. I suspected one hard disk having a problem, but I wanted to set up Debian with RAID1. What to do?

I was able to set up a RAID1 with two disks in the installer, but only select one of both disks as activated. After that (I was ready to test both, but luckily hit the fast one on first try) the installation was much faster.

GRUB installation failed

I had multiple installation attempts (because I first tried KDE, didn’t like it, and then tried Cinnamon). Both times the last step reported a failure installing GRUB. For whatever reason it always worked when I chose the other hard disk. But it was not always the same disk! On the second installation attempt I had to choose the seemingly slow hard disk as GRUB device.

Before I exchange the disk, I’ll have to copy GRUB over to the other disk.

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