giulianopz's weblog. Brain dumps and small hacks
I was upgrading the RAM (4GB->16GB) and the disk (HDD->SDD) of an old laptop of mine that is currently used by my parents. This laptop is an Acer Aspire E15 (ES1-571 series).
After installing Debian 12 on the new disk, I found myself stupefied again by the creepy message “No Bootable Device” when trying to reboot the machine.
This is at least the third time that I reinstall Linux on this laptop but I keep forgetting what is causing this mess. Hence, this brief post.
As it turns out, this series of Acer laptops requires you to select an UEFI file as trusted: you have to enter the BIOS menu and manually select the path of shimx64.efi (e.g. EFI\debian\shimx64.efi), a shim that launches GRUB on computers which have Secure Boot active, in the Security panel.
This is basically a collection of scripts that can generate the password you need if you pass to it the key that the BIOS will print after entering an invalid password for three times. More technical details in the article linked in the references.
