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I have a Debian based server, where every partition is RAIDed, except the one that has /boot/efi. This means that I will still have all my data after a disk failure, but the system may be unable to boot.

Is there a good way to create a redundant grub install / EFI partition?

I tried mdadm RAID with v0.90 headers, but its fragile thus unsupported. I also found that grub supports syncing multiple EFI partitions on Ubuntu, but it's also not available on Debian.

sfphoton
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    Does this answer your question? RAID 1 of /boot/efi partition on Debian – Nicolas Formichella Nov 12 '21 at 15:55
  • Not really. RAID is unsupported for grub because " You will get corruption the first time your EFI writes data to one of the VFAT filesystems (which EFI is allowed to do)." - See this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1868553 grub-install will even break because of this, just as in the bug report. I also tried the mentioned multi-EFI support, but it's not available on Debian. – sfphoton Nov 13 '21 at 20:55
  • How about just copying the contents of /boot/efi to your RAIDed disks, so if there's a driver failure, you could restore it from a rescue shell? – aviro May 31 '23 at 15:19
  • How about shrinking one of your RAID volumes and creating an extra VFAT partition outside the RAID volume? – svin83 May 31 '23 at 20:08
  • My main goal would be to avoid unexpected downtime on reboot, in case my EFI disk is in a failed state. My best idea currently is to always check disk status before reboot. An optimal solution would provide multiple bootable EFI partitions, keeping in sync, even after a grub update. – sfphoton Jun 01 '23 at 07:44
  • So no, every disk can only have one grub. You cannot install grub on multiple partitions. The only possible solution would be to have a separate disk that you can make bootable and backup your grub on. Or even on a USB stick that can load your system in case your /boot/efi fails. But with just a single disk - no can do. – aviro Jun 01 '23 at 08:02
  • I mean I do have multiple disks. I want one EFI partition on more than one disk, and mirror them. – sfphoton Jun 01 '23 at 08:04
  • Try a partitionable Raid1 (mdp) using Superblock 1.0. – Adrian Zaugg Jun 02 '23 at 21:09

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