Moving from CentOS to openSuSE Leap 15.2.
Have two 2TiB drives RAID'd and LVM'd
sd[ab]1 500MiB EFI SysPart /boot/efi
sd[ab]2 1.82 TiB RAID (/dev/md0) -- also /dev/system/home (LVM)
sd[ab]3 2 GiB SWAP

Several days trying to follow the directions
Finally booting with single user, ready to start with KVM.
But testing, I can boot off my first disk, but not my second.
My reading to date finally lead me to
YaST Partioner looks good.
looks good.

Doesn't boot off second drive.
What did I forget to to, or wrongly did?
How do I fix it from here?

Hi,

I'm not very familiar with EFI, but I'm almost sure you can only have one partition with /boot/EFI
Because your BIOS is set to boot on your main Drive (/dev/sda) and it looks for a /boot/EFI partition on it. That's why I think you won't be able to boot to your Second Drive (/dev/sdb)

Maybe, take a look at this link :
https://medium.com/@manujarvinen/set...ns-ca1fcf8d502

Thanks, marav

My issue is, if, of the RAID disk-pair, it's the one that has the boot on it fails, I've lost my data because I can't boot from the other disk while I get around to replacing the failed disk.

I'll read your link tomorrow and see if it solves my problem.

Remove power to the first drive and see how you go.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 won't exactly be a raid pair. ??

That is a complete exact copy.

jefro -- sda is the drive RAID'd to sdb; sda1 was the boot partition, so I dd'd it to the boot partion on the other drive: sdb1, as instructed by the article to which I referred.

When I built the system, via YaST & partitioner, as instructed via SuSE install, I set sda2 and sdb2 as LinuxRAID, then selected RAID to make them raid'd them, then gave it to LVM.

SWAP is the 3rd partition on both drives.
It's quite possible I'm misreading the install instructions, but that's where I am and how I got there.


syg00: I press <.F2> during the POST to allow me to boot from either physical disk ONE or TWO; choosing TWO tells me there is nothing from which to boot.
Later I may disconnect power from ONE later to test as you suggest, but I suspect the results will be the same.


I'm going to re-read SLES/15-SP1 documentation: 8. Configuring Software RAID for the Root Partition.
https://documentation.suse.com/sles/...-raidroot.html

It has this line:
I don't know how to, or not to, or if I can, do this.
I'm just following the instructions during the install.

And this other thing:
Clearly, I've missed something and done something I shouldn't have, didn't do something I should have.

Solved.
Many things.
One, in looking on the screen, instead of my print-out of it, I see more clearly I was to make three (logical) RAID disks, one for BootEFI, one for SWAP, and one for the data.

(Once you know it) you can see it said that in the instruction page I linked last post.

Second confusion was Partitioning, after sizing, assigns function, formatting and mount point.
If, after size, you declare function of Linux RAID, the rest goes away.
Later, you amalgamate them into a RAID. That's it, nothing indicates you've now got to modify the RAID you just made to assign the formatting and mount point.

System now built and boots off either drive (when I <.F2> then choose which disk to boot).
That's good enough for me for now. I'll disconnect the disks for that test later (as well as test the madam command for anything it will tell me).

Final question, for me and not the group, comes from I have a choice, LVM the RAID'd device -- OR -- I can keep them separate (un-RAID'd), give them both to LVM and let it do the RAIDing for you.
That's what I did a decade or so ago with my CentOS/7 set-up, which also helped confuse me, was I to RAID then LVM, or LVM then RAID?

So I'm experimenting with that now. There seems to be a size restriction of RAID then LVM; but perhaps I'm (again) misunderstanding things.

Thanks to all for your advice and counsel to date.
I'll mark this closed/solved.

Updates that include any part of loader won't be updated I'd think.