Poweredge T320 corrupt GRUB

Question

I've installed Debian on a Dell Poweredge T320 to use as a home server. It's been up for over a year now. Last reboot it would not boot as apparently a kernel update apparently breaks grub, and perhaps writes it to the wrong place.

The PERC H710 manages the RAID5 (sdc) and SATA disks (sda,sdb), but the SSD (sdd) is on its own.

Testing grub returns "error: no such device: c6408337-XXX" blkid lists the partition "/dev/sdd2: UUID="c6408337-XXX" (correct)

I'm at a loss here, why cant grub find the partition when blkid does? And where to I go from here? parted -l

Answer 1

As there was no big enthusiasm to provide suggestions here I decided to to have a go at this by trial and error.

I had a small suspicion that legacy BIOS boot was not doing me any favors here, so I decided to convert my Debian install to UEFI. This is what I did: Boot from a Debian live CD, create EFI partition, then:

mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt

# for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

# chroot /mnt

# grub-install /dev/sdb

# update-grub

CTRL D

then reboot

It now boots fine albeit in UEFI mode.