Arch migration (success!!)

[Michael Butash]

How does one handle redundant disks *properly* or *officially* with EFI?

First/Last time I dealt with EFI was an asus that had 2x SSD's (factory
raid 0[!]) that I intended to raid 1 for redundancy vs. performance.  It
had no legacy boot option at all (shame, asus), so I was forced to work
with it.  I eventually got my recipe up on it with mdadm, crypto, and lvm
with ubuntu after weeks of fiddling with it, but never really figured out a
better way to deal with efi partition.  I had setup a cronjob to rsync the
efi directory, never really tested the actual failure scenario and/or
recovery however before I gave up on the laptop otherwise (and job).

Maybe that is/was good enough, just wasn't sure how well the efi bios would
switch up disks like that, as something at the time made me believe it
wouldn't.  I've read efi is somewhat fakeraid aware, perhaps that's an
option since mdadm works with fakeraids too...

Surely I'm not the only one to do redundant disks in desktops, but do seem
to be one of an odd few.

-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Kevin Fries <kevin at fries-biro.com> wrote:

> I suspect the issue was more with UDev and those fancy new drives.  I just
> wiped then installed Arch on a brand new HP laptop with GPT, zero issues.
> I especially like the lack of a separate /boot partition by reusing the
> EFI/GPT boot sector.
>
> Personally, my install was very straightforward and stable as hell.
>
> Kevin
>
> On Dec 20, 2016 9:13 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael at butash.net> wrote:
>
>> I agree, this is why I keep separate /usr partitions, both to allow for
>> growth, and to monitor my growth.  Another weird thing Arch has such a
>> difficult time booting with a separate /usr, more like the dev's ass-u-me
>> again no one will *ever* do this...
>>
>> I started doing it as a means of checks for watching growth over the
>> years.  In the old days of 8.04, usually a 4gb partition for /usr was fine,
>> and less than a gig for actual root (/).  Now I fill /usr with at least 6gb
>> of data on install it seems, 7-8gb is more the norm.
>>
>> Use of GPT is/was really trying to keep up with tech, where early days of
>> SSD, fdisk was terrible about alignment, where most things can and still do
>> say to use GPT.  Just no one tells you it is inherently broken still on
>> most platforms to consider booting off of.
>>
>> I'd be more inclined to try EFI, but I'm fond of consistent raid
>> approaches, even for boot partitions, where the inflexible FatFS nature of
>> EFI partition just rubs me the wrong way as it can't be made natively
>> redundant like I can with /boot being on mdraid partitions happily booting
>> linux otherwise.  Curious what others do with redundancy around EFI desktop
>> drives...
>>
>> Even without another shed of M$ on here, it still finds a way to screw
>> things up.
>>
>> -mb
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:09 AM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:17:38 -0700
>>> Michael Butash <michael at butash.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> > I really had no idea GPT was such an anomaly still.  Everything I
>>> > read was like "just do it!".  Not.
>>>
>>> At this point in time, laptop hard disks still aren't big enough to
>>> require EFI, and desktops have multiple disks. So what I do on laptops
>>> that can still do MBR is MBR format the hard disk.
>>>
>>> With my daily driver desktop, with a 4TB disk, and a 3TB disk, and a
>>> 256GB SSD, I MBR boot to the SSD, which also contains the whole /usr
>>> and /etc tree for easy bootability in these days of symlinked /usr. So
>>> I get the advantages of GPT on my large disks, the simple booting of
>>> MBR on my SSD: It works fast and beautifully.
>>>
>>> SteveT
>>>
>>> Steve Litt
>>> December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
>>> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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>>
>>
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