I'm sorry if this forum isn't the right place to ask to be hand-held. I use an HP laptop and Debian 12 encrypted with LUKS2 on a hard drive. Last night I very foolishly opened a krita file that was too large and resource-intensive for my laptop to handle, and Debian froze. I couldn't move my mouse and there was a long delay between pressing the caps lock key and the led light turning on, so i held down the power button and my laptop turned off. I've done this many times before and it always Just Worked but I know that's not a responsible or safe way to use a computer, and I'm finally paying the price.
What's happening now is that when I turn my laptop back on it loads the startup menu. If I press f1 it brings me to bios but the screen flashes repeatedly and can't be interacted with and I have to power-off. If I press enter it takes me to GRUB, except instead of the menu it loads a command line (still in the usual GUI), and it repeats the blank line down the screen over and over again and cant be interacted with until i press ctrl alt f1, then it stops repeating and lets me type. I tried "help" and that seems to work and lists commands but I don't know where to begin with that. I saw the command "password" and tried that (I don't know what correlation there would be between whatever "password" for grub means and trying to decrypt my drive, I know my grandma level tech proficiency is very funny I hope this post made your day.) and it gave me "error: prohibited by secure boot policy.", I do not use secure boot so I'm guessing that's GRUB's interpretation of what happened to my bios. I haven't tried anything else yet since I don't want to accidentally make it worse.
It's at least a bios issue but I feel like this behavior from GRUB indicates that Debian was also corrupted. I'm very scared that because my installation is encrypted (using default encryption settings from the Debian installer, I have my password written down) everything has been permanently scrambled. I'm also certain this wasn't caused by malware if that's what it sounds like, I'm careful with what I download and what sites I visit. What steps from here can I take to try to get my files back? I'm not concerned about saving the laptop as a whole beyond what I need for file recovery, the timing was abhorrent I literally just got a new laptop the other day and was about to install another Linux distro, and then this happens. If there's nothing I can do should I try bringing my laptop to a professional or is it likely a lost cause?
What's happening now is that when I turn my laptop back on it loads the startup menu. If I press f1 it brings me to bios but the screen flashes repeatedly and can't be interacted with and I have to power-off. If I press enter it takes me to GRUB, except instead of the menu it loads a command line (still in the usual GUI), and it repeats the blank line down the screen over and over again and cant be interacted with until i press ctrl alt f1, then it stops repeating and lets me type. I tried "help" and that seems to work and lists commands but I don't know where to begin with that. I saw the command "password" and tried that (I don't know what correlation there would be between whatever "password" for grub means and trying to decrypt my drive, I know my grandma level tech proficiency is very funny I hope this post made your day.) and it gave me "error: prohibited by secure boot policy.", I do not use secure boot so I'm guessing that's GRUB's interpretation of what happened to my bios. I haven't tried anything else yet since I don't want to accidentally make it worse.
It's at least a bios issue but I feel like this behavior from GRUB indicates that Debian was also corrupted. I'm very scared that because my installation is encrypted (using default encryption settings from the Debian installer, I have my password written down) everything has been permanently scrambled. I'm also certain this wasn't caused by malware if that's what it sounds like, I'm careful with what I download and what sites I visit. What steps from here can I take to try to get my files back? I'm not concerned about saving the laptop as a whole beyond what I need for file recovery, the timing was abhorrent I literally just got a new laptop the other day and was about to install another Linux distro, and then this happens. If there's nothing I can do should I try bringing my laptop to a professional or is it likely a lost cause?
Statistics: Posted by 5ththrowawaaway5 — 2026-01-01 09:14