Re: [gentoo-user] Anybody using refind?

[Klaus Dittrich <kladit@t-online.de>]

On 02.02.23 10:51, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On Thursday, February 2, 2023 10:42:40 AM CET Klaus Dittrich wrote:
>> Is there andbody using refind? Especially in Germany?
>> I have some questions about.
> 
> If you have questions, feel free to ask on this list.
> I am sure I am not the only one using it.
> 
> --
> Joost
> 
> 
> 
> 
Joost,

my current system boots from bios(mbr) not uefi.

My knowlege of uefi is poor and uefi is still confusing me.
So it may be some of my questions will looking silly for you.

I now have prepared a gpt disk with two partitions,
one efi (fat32) and one for my system (ext4) with my existing
system already copied (dd'ed) on it.
This existing system was one partition only, no separate boot partition.

Now I want to know how the efi partition has to look after
I have installed refind.

refind can read ext4 so where have I to put the kernels?

Into /boot of the ext4 partition, where they already are,
or on /boot/efi/EFI/? which gets mounted after the kernel
has read /etc/fstab.

Can you post a tree of /boot with the esp-partition already mounted
of your refind booted system?


refind can only boot kernels compiled with CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y.

Can refind find and boot such kernels if the exist on a second disk?

I always copied my running (mbr/bios) system to a second disk,
so if something went wrong I switched the bootdisk in bios to
the backup disk and was up again a minute later.

I did this with a simple script that edited /etc/fstab and did
the copy by ddpt so only the differences since the last copy
were written.So saving a fine running system before changing
something critical on it was done in less than two minutes
using nvme-disks which can read very fast.

I will try to achieve the same with uefi, but uefi does not show
me devices to switch to like bios did.
How to brand the system- and the backup-disk so refind can distinguish
between them?


Will it be possible to have refind at an usb-stick and let it
boot one of the two identical systems from of two different disks?

The goal is to be prepared against disk failures and system failures
and to have always have a running system to boot from and to repair
the one that failed or to clone it to a new disk in case one of the 
disks failed.
So the only failure able to set me offline will be a hardware failure
on motherboard or powersupply.

-- 
Regards Klaus