2019-06-19
Looking at the wrong side of a mirrored disk 11 months ago
Due to recent kernel updates I rebooted the home server and ran into only older kernels available. Some searching later I found out it booted from another disk than the disk the update manager was maintaining /boot on. The solution was to mirror the /boot partition by hand and change the EFI boot setup to try a boot from both disks, so the machine will still boot when one half of the mirror is completely unavailable. I did buy mirrored disks to have the machine available with one disk unavailable. Changing the EFI boot setup with efibootmgr was somewhat complicated, but I got it all done. How to add a second disk found via Partitioning EFI machine with two SSD disks in mirror - Unix & Linux stackexchange and understanding the numbers in the efibootmgr -v output via "efibootmgr -v" output question. The ideal solution would be to have /boot and /boot/efi on mirrored partitions without metadata (so they are readable too from the efi loader as an unmirrored partition). According to what I read this is possible in Linux with devicemapper but there is not a lot of experience shared.