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Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

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questlinq
Posts: 69
Joined: 2017-09-19 08:51

Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

#1 Post by questlinq »

Hello,

I have Debian 9 with 3 partitions installed on /dev/sda

/dev/sda1 (EFI)
/dev/sda2 (EXT4)
/dev/sda3 (EXT4)

and 3 partitions installed on /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb1 (EFI)
/dev/sdb2 (EXT4)
/dev/sdb3 (EXT4)

all partitions are GPT.

Debian 9 gets successfully booted from '/dev/sda' while it fails to boot from '/dev/sdb'.

I've done grub-install /dev/sdb1 and update-grub /dev/sdb1 - and it still fails to boot from second/spare device.
I would appreciate any input that would help me to solve this issue.

Thank you

Palmstroem
Posts: 19
Joined: 2017-08-12 12:36

Re: Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

#2 Post by Palmstroem »

Normally there should be only one EFI system partition on your whole computer e.g., in /sda1. Then you could start your second Debian system (maybe under / in /sdb2) also from an entry that is placed in /sda1.

On the other hand, if you are insisting on a complete duplicated system (sda and sdb) then you have to find some way in the firmware menu to totally ignore /sda so that it will only "see" /sdb. Unfortunately this way is not standardized and depends on the hardware manufacturer. As far as I know in any case it is necessary to mark only one partition as EFI boot partition.

What do you want to achieve with your configuration?

questlinq
Posts: 69
Joined: 2017-09-19 08:51

Re: Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

#3 Post by questlinq »

@Palmstroem

I would like to achieve a successful boot of a second drive if first drive in RAID 1 configuration fails.

Palmstroem
Posts: 19
Joined: 2017-08-12 12:36

Re: Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

#4 Post by Palmstroem »

See here: https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Missing_features.
Bottom line:
But for software RAID systems there is currently no support for putting the ESP on two separate disks in RAID.

p.H
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Re: Grub Boot Loader on Debian 9

#5 Post by p.H »

What kind of RAID setup is this ? Hardware RAID or Linux software RAID (md) ?
There are no Linux RAID partitions on your disks, just regular ext4 partitions.
Palmstroem wrote:But for software RAID systems there is currently no support for putting the ESP on two separate disks in RAID.
No need for specific support. You can create a separate EFI partition on each disk and manually install GRUB on each of them. Works fine here. Just be careful on grub* package updates.
Palmstroem wrote:Normally there should be only one EFI system partition on your whole computer
This is just not true. There can be as many EFI partitions as you need. One per disk, or even several on one disk.

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