Issue with EFI and Grub conflicting against each other

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

Hi!

The context of the issue

Virtualmin 7.1-1 and Webmin 1.999 (they’re the latest stable) here, on a Debian Buster server on which I host websites for friends and family, plus myself. 4 hard drives are present on the server, 2 SATAs in Raid-1, 2 SSDs in Raid-1.

I’m not a professional, just a guy who learnt step by step over the years. My system was set up by an IT guy for a small fee, the daily maintenance and configuration is for me, a system I’m comfortable with. Normally, I’m good with whatever operations I must perform, but in today’s case, I risk to find my server unable to reboot if I screw up, so I’m getting excessively careful…

The issue

I have a weird (by my own standards) issue:

I cannot install or update packages anymore, because Debian wants me to finalize the configuration of Grub-pc, telling it which drive it has to be installed to.
Whatever apt-get install I may want to run, grub-pc’s configuration dialog starts up anyway in my putty terminal and wants me to tell which drive it should be installed into. At which point I close the putty tab because I’d rather not screw up a boot sequence.

However… as far as I can tell, to boot, my server uses EFI.

Two tests seem to confirm it:

/sys/firmware/efi/ is present in the filesystem, with several files inside.

And the lsblk command:

lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0   3,7T  0 disk
`-sda1        8:1    0   3,7T  0 part
  `-md3       9:3    0   3,7T  0 raid1 /home
sdb           8:16   0   3,7T  0 disk
`-sdb1        8:17   0   3,7T  0 part
  `-md3       9:3    0   3,7T  0 raid1 /home
nvme0n1     259:0    0   477G  0 disk
|-nvme0n1p1 259:2    0   511M  0 part
|-nvme0n1p2 259:3    0 468,4G  0 part
| `-md2       9:2    0 468,4G  0 raid1 /
|-nvme0n1p3 259:4    0     8G  0 part  [SWAP]
`-nvme0n1p4 259:5    0     1M  0 part
nvme1n1     259:1    0   477G  0 disk
|-nvme1n1p1 259:6    0   511M  0 part  /boot/efi
|-nvme1n1p2 259:7    0 468,4G  0 part
| `-md2       9:2    0 468,4G  0 raid1 /
`-nvme1n1p3 259:8    0     8G  0 part  [SWAP]

Please, can I humbly ask for a confirmation that I can safely assume my server indeed boots up with EFI?

And, from there, can I assume I should be uninstalling grub-pc? Or should I do something else, is there a preferable option, something like put it on mute, make it understand it is not the current boot choice?

Thank you so much if you can help!!

2

And you’re running on? Windows me? You are not considered the fact anyone would even guess your os you’re on nor kernel or other details…

3

Allow me a quotation

cough

It may be possible you accidentally skipped over that part.

EDIT: that said, “latest stable” doesn’t mean anything, it was improper, so I’ll update my post to add: webmin 1.999, virtualmin 7.1-1

4

What is the output of:

efibootmgr -v
5

Hi and thanks,

The output is

efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0004
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0004,0005,0002,0001
Boot0001  Hard Drive    BBS(HD,,0x0)/VenHw(5ce8128b-2cec-40f0-8372-80640e3dc858,0200)..GO..NO..........H.G.S.T. .H.U.S.7.2.6.T.4.T.A.L.A.6.L.1...................\.,.@.r.d.=.X.........A..........................>..Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.6.V.1.G.W.7.N.K. . . . . . . . . . . . .......BO..NO..........H.G.S.T. .H.U.S.7.2.6.T.4.T.A.L.A.6.L.1...................\.,.@.r.d.=.X.........A..........................>..Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.6.V.Z.G.P.9.S.V. . . . . . . . . . . . .......BO..NO..........W.D.C. .C.L. .S.N.7.2.0. .S.D.A.Q.N.T.W.-.5.1.2.G.-.2.0.0.0...................\.,.@.r.d.=.X.........A............................DJD..........Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.1.9.5.2.E.Q.4.4.1.3.0.6.......BO..NO..........W.D.C. .C.L. .S.N.7.2.0. .S.D.A.Q.N.T.W.-.5.1.2.G.-.2.0.0.0...................\.,.@.r.d.=.X.........A............................DJD..........Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.1.9.5.2.E.Q.4.4.6.5.1.1.......BO
Boot0002  UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell      VenMedia(5023b95c-db26-429b-a648-bd47664c8012)..BO
Boot0004* UEFI: PXE IPv4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection X722 for 10GBASE-T        PciRoot(0x3)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x3,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/MAC(ac1f6bdf50ba,1)/IPv4(0.0.0.00.0.0.0,0,0)..BO
Boot0005* UEFI: PXE IPv4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection X722 for 10GBASE-T        PciRoot(0x3)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x3,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x1)/MAC(ac1f6bdf50bb,1)/IPv4(0.0.0.00.0.0.0,0,0)..BO
Boot0006* debian        HD(1,GPT,0fee750d-a044-4142-8182-9d88460a01c8,0x800,0xff800)/File(\EFI\debian\shimx64.efi)
MirroredPercentageAbove4G: 0.00
MirrorMemoryBelow4GB: false

From the looks of it, yeah, this is UEFI, so for whatever reason Grub waved “hello”, I can safely get rid of it, can I?

(sorry if that’s 101% obvious from the outside, I simply don’t want to wake up to a server that had its bi-yearly crash but now won’t manage to reboot!)

6

You do not want to delete grub. Pretty sure running with both the bios one and efi one installed is ok.

What is the output of:

find /etc/ -name "grub*"

7

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