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I have two computers, exact same hardware, one is at a factory, the other I keep at home. I install the software on my computer at home, then take the harddrive out and then when I go to the factory I just swap the harddrives and it saves a lot of time of struggling with poor internet, and nowhere to place a keyboard.

This has worked fine while I was using Ubuntu 20.04. however I recently changed to Debian 11. And the harddrive swap did not work. It would not boot up at all, it would say "insert bootable media", but if I went into the BIOS it could see the harddrive, and was set to boot first from the new harddrive.

I suspect it might have something to do with Micosoft Windows requiring security keys for their trusted platform or some secure BIOS. I tried turning secure boot off in the BIOS and it still did not help.

Any ideas or topics to research that might uncover why it did not work, or what I could try in the future?

run_the_race
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    Check your /etc/fstab. Do any of the disk partitions use the "UUID=" construction? sudo lsblk -f. Is the Boot flag set on one partition? Do not reply via Add comment. [Edit] your Question to add information. – waltinator May 03 '22 at 23:05
  • Not an answer to your question, but useful for future updates: Debian has a package to assist with offline upgrades. It's called apt-offline - the github page for it is at https://github.com/rickysarraf/apt-offline. You need to install it on both your home machine (the one with the internet connection) AND on your factory machine. BTW, Ubuntu has the same program. See also: How to upgrade Debian 10 to Debian 11 without internet? – cas May 04 '22 at 01:49
  • UEFI or BIOS? UEFI typically forgets boot entries when a drive is removed. You then have to use UEFI boot menu and choose the drive entry which is a fallback entry using /EFI/bootx64.efi. You will not have an "ubuntu" entry. – oldfred May 04 '22 at 17:28

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