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Jon Hulka
Asked: 2023-12-24 09:05:49 +0800 CST

How can I maintain EFI partitions on a RAID1 when running updates or replacing a failed RAID1 drive?

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I installed Ubuntu Server 22.03 on a system with 3 identical hard drives. During the disk setup process, I created 500M fat32 partitions on each of my hard drives and configured the rest of the disk space as RAID1. After setting the esp flag on the fat32 partitions I was able to select them all as boot devices. After installation, contents of the EFI partitions are identical (I checked with rsync). I want to ensure that the system will always be able to boot from any of the drives.

What I want to know:

  • will system updates keep the EFI partitions synchronized?
  • if so, what do I need to do when replacing a failed RAID drive to ensure that its EFI partition remains synchronized?
uefi

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It looks like the system updates won't keep the EFI partitions up to date. Here's a shell script that should do the trick.

    !!!WARNING!!! this will overwrite all EFI partitions on your system. If you have EFI partitions that you don't want synchronized, DON'T USE THIS SCRIPT.

    #!/bin/bash

# Define the mount point of the EFI partition
EFI_MOUNT="/boot/efi"
# Temporary mount point base directory
TEMP_MOUNT_DIR="/tmp/efi_sync/"

# Check if anything is mounted at /boot/efi
if ! mountpoint -q $EFI_MOUNT; then
    echo "Error: No partition is mounted on $EFI_MOUNT. Please check your configuration."
    exit 1
fi

# Get the device path of the currently mounted EFI partition
CURRENT_EFI_DEV=$(findmnt -n -o SOURCE --target $EFI_MOUNT)

# Check if the mounted partition is an EFI System Partition
if ! blkid -t TYPE="vfat" $CURRENT_EFI_DEV &>/dev/null; then
    echo "Error: The partition mounted on $EFI_MOUNT is not an EFI System Partition."
    exit 1
fi

# Find the hard drives
DISKS=$(lsblk -d -n -o NAME,TYPE | grep disk | awk '{print $1}')
EFI_PARTITIONS=()

for DISK in $DISKS; do
    # Find all partitions on the drive
    PARTITIONS=$(sudo fdisk -l /dev/$DISK | grep "^/dev")
    while read -r PARTITION; do
        # Determine whether this partition is EFI
        if echo "$PARTITION" | grep -q "EFI System"; then
            EFI_PARTITIONS+=($(awk '{print $1}' <<< "$PARTITION"))
        fi
    done <<< "$PARTITIONS"
done
# Convert array to space-delimited string
EFI_PARTITIONS=${EFI_PARTITIONS[@]}
echo $EFI_PARTITIONS

# Get list of unique drives with EFI partitions
EFI_DRIVES=$(for PART in $EFI_PARTITIONS; do lsblk -no PKNAME $PART; done | sort -u)

for DRIVE in $EFI_DRIVES; do
    echo "installing grub to /dev/$DRIVE"
    grub-install /dev/$drive
done

# Mount EFI partitions and update using rsync
mkdir -p $TEMP_MOUNT_DIR
for PART in $EFI_PARTITIONS; do
    if [ "$PART" != "$CURRENT_EFI_DEV" ]; then
        echo "Syncing $PART with $CURRENT_EFI_DEV"
        mount $PART $TEMP_MOUNT_DIR
        rsync -av --delete $EFI_MOUNT/ $TEMP_MOUNT_DIR/
        umount $TEMP_MOUNT_DIR
    fi
done
rmdir $TEMP_MOUNT_DIR

DRIVES_ARRAY=($EFI_DRIVES)
echo "EFI partitions synchronized and GRUB installed on ${#DISKS_ARRAY[@]} drives."
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