At Tue, 7 Oct 2025 14:48:48 -0500 Ram Ramesh <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Yes what you've described will work except for having to shrink the > > second partition a little for the backup GPT header. mdadm guides have > > got you there; should be pretty simple for a RAID-1 that's not totally > > full. > > > > > As I have indicated, I am deleting everything in the disk as I convert > to GPT with same size MD partition. I have about 32G of free space to > work with as the current MBR partition 1 is empty/unused. So, there > should be no issues with secondary table at the end. The new partitions > will automatically move up a bit and RAID rebuild will take care of > initializing the new partition after I clobber the disk and recreate a > new GPT layout. > > > Most people seem to opt for having two ESPs that are kept in sync and > > thus both/either are selectable from the firmware boot process. > > > I am not too worried about any redundancy on EFI/boot partitions as a > broken EFI is easy to fix with booting install disk in rescue mode and > reinstalling grup again. What you should do is make EFI/boot partitions on both disks. And then manually sync them -- this is not a "continious" process, just when something changes (eg new kernel, new EFI settings, whatever). If the "boot" disk fails, the other has a copy of the EFI stuff, so you don't need to mess with a rescue disk, just swap the second disk to the boot disk position, and the system will boot (with the RAID in degraded mode). When a replacement disk arrives, install it as the second disk, partition it, sync over the EFI/boot partituons, and do the usual RAID rebuild for the main data partiition. > > Regards > Ramesh > > > -- Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364 Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services [email protected] -- Webhosting Services
