Hi. I need some guidance here.
I want to replace the boot drive of a computer and then add a second drive to create a Raid1 system for the boot and / filesytem. For now, home will stay where it its, on a separate drive for now.
The Boot drive is old. It is a Crucial SSD about 8 years old. It holds the /boot/efi directory on a small FAT partition, the /boot partition on an EXT4 partition and the root (/) on a btrfs partition.
/home is on another, HDD and larger drive with a btrfs partition. This is a home computer and not kind of mission critical.
Here come my questions. 1. Can I move everything on the SSD to a new SSD with everything under btrfs? From what I have been reading it seems like /boot/efi still needs to be on a vfat partition, but /boot could be moved into btrfs. Would it still need a different partition or can it live within the same partition with the / filesystem? 2. I understand from what I have been reading that btrfs has Raid1 capabilities therefore I could add the second drive and from btrfs add it to the partition as a mirror. But if vfat has to exist for the /boot/efi, how am I supposed to mirror it? I have read some articles but they seem kind of old (more than 3 years) and it seems like the way Fedora does it is not a standard way. I'd rather not have to use a hardware RAID controller.
I would appreciate your insights.
Thanks
On 29 Dec 2023, at 09:02, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Here come my questions.
- Can I move everything on the SSD to a new SSD with everything under btrfs? From what I have been reading it seems like /boot/efi still needs to be on a vfat partition, but /boot could be moved into btrfs. Would it still need a different partition or can it live within the same partition with the / filesystem?
- I understand from what I have been reading that btrfs has Raid1 capabilities therefore I could add the second drive and from btrfs add it to the partition as a mirror. But if vfat has to exist for the /boot/efi, how am I supposed to mirror it?
I have read some articles but they seem kind of old (more than 3 years) and it seems like the way Fedora does it is not a standard way. I'd rather not have to use a hardware RAID controller.
I would appreciate your insights.
I would install Fedora freshly on the new SSD then copy any config and data files from the old SSD over. You can get a list of all the packages you have installed using rpm -qa. Save that list so that you know what you want to add back in to the new system. (You can diff the old rpm list against the new old to spot omissions)
When installing on the new SSD remove the old one from the system to avoid the installing use the old SSD's /boot/efi. Once you can boot off the new SSD then put the old one back into the system so that you can copy config and data over. Be careful when updating /etc that you do not break the new system. You can diff config files to check what the changes would be.
That will give you the a correctly configured SSD for booting the system and a new file system for the rest.
Were you thinking to use RAID1 to copy the old SSD on to the new SSD? That will not work. Mirroring works at the block level and you cannot mirror ext4 onto btrfs.
Also as you observed the EFI partition must be FAT so that the UEFI BIOS can boot the system. I have used BIOS RAID to mirror the EFI boot partition in the past. Not needed to do that for a while.
Barry
Hi Barry. Thanks. I have an additional question down.
On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 5:09 AM Barry Scott barry@barrys-emacs.org wrote:
On 29 Dec 2023, at 09:02, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Here come my questions.
- Can I move everything on the SSD to a new SSD with everything under
btrfs? From what I have been reading it seems like /boot/efi still needs to be on a vfat partition, but /boot could be moved into btrfs. Would it still need a different partition or can it live within the same partition with the / filesystem? 2. I understand from what I have been reading that btrfs has Raid1 capabilities therefore I could add the second drive and from btrfs add it to the partition as a mirror. But if vfat has to exist for the /boot/efi, how am I supposed to mirror it? I have read some articles but they seem kind of old (more than 3 years) and it seems like the way Fedora does it is not a standard way. I'd rather not have to use a hardware RAID controller.
I would appreciate your insights.
I would install Fedora freshly on the new SSD then copy any config and data files from the old SSD over. You can get a list of all the packages you have installed using rpm -qa. Save that list so that you know what you want to add back in to the new system. (You can diff the old rpm list against the new old to spot omissions)
When installing on the new SSD remove the old one from the system to avoid the installing use the old SSD's /boot/efi. Once you can boot off the new SSD then put the old one back into the system so that you can copy config and data over. Be careful when updating /etc that you do not break the new system. You can diff config files to check what the changes would be.
That will give you the a correctly configured SSD for booting the system and a new file system for the rest.
Were you thinking to use RAID1 to copy the old SSD on to the new SSD? That will not work. Mirroring works at the block level and you cannot mirror ext4 onto btrfs.
Question here. Can I on the new install select the /boot to be btrfs? Do I
need to make it a separate partition or should I just let the install wizard alone to do that?
Also as you observed the EFI partition must be FAT so that the UEFI BIOS can boot the system. I have used BIOS RAID to mirror the EFI boot partition in the past. Not needed to do that for a while.
Barry
--
------------------------------ /_/\ |O O| pepebuho@gmail.com ~~~~ Javier Perez ~~~~ While the night runs ~~~~ toward the day... m m Pepebuho watches from his high perch.
On 30 Dec 2023, at 10:50, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Question here. Can I on the new install select the /boot to be btrfs? Do I need to make it a separate partition or should I just let the install wizard alone to do that?
Let the install wizard decide.
There are rules about file system choices that must be followed or your machine will not boot.
I am not sure of all the rules, some are /boot must be support by grub2, EFI must be FAT32.
Barry
On Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:58:41 +0000 Barry wrote:
On 30 Dec 2023, at 10:50, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Question here. Can I on the new install select the /boot to be btrfs? Do I need to make it a separate partition or should I just let the install wizard alone to do that?
I am not sure of all the rules, some are /boot must be support by grub2,
grub2 supports btrfs for reading (grub.cfg, grubenv), but is unable to write grubenv.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/t4si4i/comment/hzy3lah/
For me that prevent setting GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT, but that was not really important.
I decided thus to not make a separate partition for /boot: simpler. It works fine since btrfs was made the default in Fedora (as of 2020-10-27 Fedora-33).
I'm only doing kickstart installations.
Thanks!
On Sat, Dec 30, 2023 at 1:45 PM Francis.Montagnac@inria.fr wrote:
On Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:58:41 +0000 Barry wrote:
On 30 Dec 2023, at 10:50, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Question here. Can I on the new install select the /boot to be btrfs?
Do I need to make it a separate partition or should I just let the install wizard alone to do that?
I am not sure of all the rules, some are /boot must be support by grub2,
grub2 supports btrfs for reading (grub.cfg, grubenv), but is unable to write grubenv.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/t4si4i/comment/hzy3lah/
For me that prevent setting GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT, but that was not really important.
I decided thus to not make a separate partition for /boot: simpler. It works fine since btrfs was made the default in Fedora (as of 2020-10-27 Fedora-33).
I'm only doing kickstart installations.
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