more debian 11 extremely basic not-workingness

 I just tried to install Debian 11 from DVD on a thinkpad X220.  This previously had Debian 10 installed on it fine.

On trying to boot after installation, it doesn't boot.  There is a menu of plausible-looking boot options, but selecting the one just called "debian", or selecting the device onto which we just tried to install "ATA HDD0: Samsung ...", both result in nothing much happening.  The menu goes away, and comes back after around 0.3s.



There are a couple of variables.  There is BIOS UEFI / legacy at boot time, and at install time.  There is the storage scheme.  I think the old one was plaintext and all-in-one, which is simple.  The new one is encrypted LVM, so a separate /boot is required, but it's not that complicated.  And we're not even getting as far as loading GRUB.  This is a BIOS boot device list.  It was one of the handful of standard storage configs offered by the debian installer.  The other variable is the version of Debian.

If it's not possible to reliably install booting system on a completely standard laptop + SATA SSD combo, it would be better to do away with the PC "architecture" altogether.

Now I've changed BIOS from UEFI to Legacy, and get the same result on booting.  But I'll try reinstalling, and paying more attention to the storage layout proposed by the debian installer, and paying attention when it's installing grub.

Most of my attempts to install Debian in the last few years have resulted in a non-booting system.  I'm clearly too stupid to use the debian installer, so I am going to have to make something that even stupid people like me can use.

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