You may still remember my babe and its first setup. Now I went on to add Debian 8.3 to Windows 10 and Ubuntu 14.04.4, and boot Debian off an NVMe SSD.

First off, the system had to be prepared to handle Debian. UEFI Secure Boot had to be disabled and Windows 10 Fast Startup turned off, too, for Debian would not boot in secure mode, and Windows NTFS might get into a funny state otherwise. Of course, I also checked that both Windows and Ubuntu would still boot with the Boot Mode set to “UEFI only” and CSM “no”.

Now the stage was set for booting off the Debian netboot DVD. The hardest part of the installation process - psychologically - was to confirm that SSD0 should be used for the installation as a whole. You see, my SSD1 (yes, the second of the two: beware!) contains pre-installed Windows 10 that I would not like to lose.

Fortunately, manual partitioning showed all the necessary details, and guided partitioning worked like charm. Without WiFi and Ethernet, I got a very compact basic system installed right off the netboot DVD and proceeded w/o installing a boot manager, for I already had one on the HDD half-occupied by Ubuntu.

Upon rebooting into Ubuntu (Debian was not yet seen in the GRUB2 menu, of course), I ran “sudo update-grub” from there, and voilà - Debian 8.3 was detected and booted smoothly off an NVMe SSD. Great job, Debian team!

So, to sum up, when installing Debian onto an NVMe SSD:

• Go for Debian 8.3
• Disable Secure Boot and Fast Startup
• Keep Boot Mode “UEFI only”, CSM “no”
• Install Debian onto an empty SSD
• Update the boot loader afterwards

By the way, before installing Debian I’ve got both GRUB2 menu and Ubuntu splash screen use proper fonts and black background. Thereafter I had to tweak the Debian console font size, too.

(to be continued)