Hi folks,
I have a problem, a big problem. I have posted a thread over at the Debian forums, but I'm unfortunately in a hurry (my workstation is bricked) so I'm going to cross-post it here (Skullgrid@lemmy.world kindly redirected me to this community for help).
I'm going to paste the text from the Debian help thread below, hopefully someone has an idea how I can pull myself out of this mess.
Quite a bit has happened, so I'll give you a short version with what I think is essential information, and if you need other details please do ask.
Essentially, I tried getting the nvidia driver on a fresh Trixie install using this tutorial (https://fostips.com/install-nvidia-driver-in-debian-13/). I reached the part where it says "After reinstalled the driver, restart your computer.", that's when the terminal turned blue and told me with big centered text that the free driver (?) was already installed and it's conflicting with the new one I am trying to install, but I just need to reboot in order to solve the conflict. So I rebooted and I was greeted by the following prompt.
This goes nowhere, it never boots into Debian. Thinking I had broken Debian, I thought to myself, no big deal, Debian had an issue anyways (see https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=827488), I'll try another random distro (Bazzite) see if it helps. But after installing Bazzite over Trixie, I got the following prompts at boot :
(this one is a bit blurry, it says "Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation")
If I go for "Continue boot" it just cycles over and over again on these prompts. And I don't know what to make of the other choices here.
I can see it's related to the operation I did with the nvidia driver, but I don't understand how the problem wasn't solved by wiping my drive with another distro ? twice... now I have tried with Nobara as well, only to get the same prompts. How can I solve this issue ? my computer is bricked and I really hope that's fixable. Anyone has a clue ?
Like I said, don't hesitate to ask if there's something I haven't said...
Cheers,
Can you turn off Secure Boot in your BIOS/EFI? That should get you booting again, and then you can figure out the MOK.
Another thing to check is that your EFI is actually booting the Linux kernel. It could be booting the MOK enrollment program which runs only at boot time. There should be a selection in the EFI settings that mentions “next boot” or something like that.
Hi, I responded to a couple other comments already to say this : thank you, I disabled secureboot and the machine boots now. I'm hoping that whatever I did with the MOK key is fixable, or at least that it won't cause problems down the line. Would you be able to tell me? from what I've been able to gather it's a means to authenticate hardware... I don't know if I need that level of security?
Cheers, appreciate the help a lot
The MOK key stuff is fixable, but it sounds like you don’t have a big need for SecureBoot in the first place. I would say leave it disabled for now.
Also, SecureBoot is more of a way to authenticate the software that is being loaded at boot time. It could prevent someone from inserting something bad at boot time. It’s nice to have but not required.
Definitely not a big need for secureboot, I just learned about its existence! Ok from more reading it also authenticates drivers... which is what brought me here. Ok, so I'll leave it disabled for now. Thanks again for the helpful advice!
This page https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot#DKMS_and_Secure_Boot Mentions the “MOK Manager EFI Utility”. That utility is the blue screens you posted. You should be able to change a setting in EFI to boot something other than the MOK Manager.
Further, I think your EFI Boot Manager has a BootNext entry that is booting the MOK utility instead of the Linux shim or kernel. You should be able to remove this BootNext entry in your EFI settings.
If you can get it booted into Linux from a bootable USB drive, you can use the “efibootmgr” program to inspect and remove the BootNext entry.
sudo efibootmgrwill show you all of the EFI boot entries. If the first line says
BootNext, then that’s likely the problem. Note that these are not grub boot entries. The EFI has a boot list that happens before grub.sudo efibootmgr —delete-bootnextwill remove the temporary BootNext entry.
After that, make sure secure boot is disabled and you should be able to boot Linux.