Bug#677280: grub-efi: cannot find normal; wrong prefix to grub2 (EFI)?

[Brian P. Flaherty]

Today I reran grub-install as root at the prompt, not through dpkg or another Debian tool. Specifically, I ran 'grub-install /dev/sdc' and it created a "debian" directory containing two identical EFI files (boot and another) on the ESP under /EFI (/dev/sdc1). I had also run update-grub beforehand. I rebooted and the prefix error was gone. I got a couple file not found messages (I think for vga.mod and vbe.mod, that update-grub puts in my grub.cfg, even though I don't have either of those modules in my /usr/lib/grub/efisubdir or in /boot/grub.) and my grub menu. However, when I selected the kernel (3.0.2-pae from sid), it says it cannot find a suitable mode, however booting. The screen freezes, but the harddrive whirls away as if booting has continued. I haven't been able to ssh in, but it is on dhcp and it doesn't always renew to the same IP. If I press the power button, the computer sounds like it is going through a shutdown process and then it does shut down.

I've read a lot on-line of different ways to try to fix it and I've not found one that works. Here's what I have done and I'm happy to provide more info:

- I can boot from a supergrub CD. I select the CD in rEFInd, get a menu of actions (detect OS, find grub.cfg, etc.) I choose detect grub.cfg and it always comes back with the one in my /boot partition (/boot/grub/). I select it and it boots. No video problems. However, the grub and initial kernel boot messages take the whole screen and are a very poor resolution (i.e., big pixels). During boot, it switches to a much smaller font and then boot to X Windows (gdm).

- Using Debian grub-mkimage, I built a grub.efi image and directory under (hd2,gpt1)/EFI/grub. I believe I included efi_ugq and font in the list of modules to put in grub.efi. That booted, but hung when the kernel loaded the radeon module. I got a message to the effect of the kerner FB conflicts with the EFI FB.

- The first paragraph above.

So, there seems to be a problem with video when I load EFI and grub all from the harddisk, but it works when I load grub from the supergrub CD.

Thank you for your time, work on grub and Debian, and for any thoughts or suggestions you might have.