Hello all,

My machine keeps wanting to boot into the Grub shell by default. I can do:

grub> set root=(hd0,1)
grub> linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
grub> initrd /initrd.img
grub> boot

and I can get into my OS then. Is there a permanent fix for this issue?

once booted you could run grub-install and update-grub. My SSD or motherboard is odd, I have to boot grub from a USB stick. At which point I can switch over to the grub on the ssd.

GRUB> insmod part_gpt
GRUB> insmod ext2
GRUB> ls
(hd0) (... ... ... ...
GRUB> configfile (hd1,gpt1)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Too lazy to update-grub on the stick, plus not the default option anyway. I have to get to the grub prompt with "c" in my case.

You can try re-install grub as root to have it do the scanning again, any time it does not find everything that was there originally when installed you get that shell option foolishness. At least that is what I am thinking happened a change in the OSs installed or drive location possibly.

Is this a new problem, meaning did it boot the way you wanted/expected previously?
Or, is this a new install and it never worked correctly?
And is this the only OS on the computer since you don't mention any other?
And, did you make any changes to drives/partitions, etc.

I don't think there is any need to re-install Grub, especially if Debian is the only OS which we don't know but doing the update-grub, if Debian uses it, should help. I don't use Debian so I don't know id it uses the update-grub stud or sudo, but in any case, as root the following will update the grub files: sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
If you aren't using sudo, you need to be logged in as root. Also, some systems name the grub directory 'grub2' so watch for that.

There are reasons to re-install grub. The version changes. Windows messes up the MBR. You changed /etc/fstab. Or any and all of the above happened since you last installed grub.

update-grub will regenerate the grub.cfg (grub2). Every time the kernel updates, update-grub gets run. One advantage of grub is that you don't need to reinstall it to the MBR with every kernel update like you do with lilo, but it does on occasion need to be reinstalled to the MBR. If only to avoid bit rot.

Grub seems to keep the UUID of / in the MBR, with symptoms of using a wrong/old UUID from /etc/fstab if you installed grub before creating / fixing /etc/fstab. So if you did something unusual like use tune2fs to change the UUID and changed /etc/fstab, you'll need to reinstall grub. Or forever be doomed to manually edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg with every kernel update.