Hello Debian EFI support developers, I would like to install Debian testing on a box with two identical drives in software RAID1 (mirroring) and I was planning the partition sizing. While doing so, I realized that this new box has UEFI (instead of BIOS) on the motherboard, and hence needs an ESP (EFI System Partition) in order to host the GRUB bootloader (correct?). I searched the web about how to set up ESP partitions on two separate drives in order to be able to boot from any of them, in case one breaks, and I found scarce and inconsistent information... :-( With the old BIOS-based machines, one would simply install GRUB on the MBR of one drive and then # dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc and select both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb as install devices. With the new UEFI-based machines, it seems to me that this possibility is not (well) supported. I read on the Debian Wiki [1] that there's "no support for putting the ESP on two separate disks in RAID" ! On the other hand, another Debian Wiki page [2] states that you can dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64 on EFI systems and select GRUB install devices. However, I don't see any debconf templates for grub-efi-amd64 in the grub2 source package debian/ directory [3]: does this mean that grub-efi-amd64 does not support asking the user to select install devices? I found a number of places [4] on the web where it is suggested to manually clone the ESP from one drive to the other with: # dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 But this should be repeated whenever anything changes on the ESP and I will sure forget doing so one day or another. There should be a trigger from the relevant packages (grub-efi-amd64, I suppose, and maybe other ones) that keeps the "slave" ESPs up-to-date w.r.t. to the "master" one: is there such a trigger? So, my question is: what's the recommended way to set up a RAID1 on a UEFI system and make sure the system will still boot, when any of the drives breaks? Is there anything that should be improved in any Debian package? I can file bug reports, but I am not sure which package I should report bugs against... Could anyone please shed some light on this issue? Thanks for your time and for any help you may provide. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#RAID_for_the_EFI_System_Partition [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SoftwareRaidRoot [3] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-grub/grub.git/tree/debian [4] for instance https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/69214/partitioning-efi-machine-with-two-ssd-disks-in-mirror -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/ There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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