On 9/15/26 3:58 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
PS:
When I migrated a few years ago it happened because the new hardware's
Intel GPU forced me to enable secure boot.
And what was once dismissed as FUD has now become a reality:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/expiration-secure-boot-signing-certificates-2026
We gained absolutely nothing, but it never stops to be a PITA.
Thank you Ralf!
That's kind of the situation I'm in. I have my desktop, where I run
Arch booting UEFI using nothing but syslinux with the ESP entry managed
with efibootmgr that is dual-boot with openSUSE Tumbleweed, which added
grub and an entry to boot the efibootmgr entry to boot Arch, so I know
it can work.
The box I'm working on is my primary server that suffered a MB/CPU
mystery voltage problem and died a week ago, so I put a new MB/CPU in
along with a an old 256G M.2 that I want to migrate / to. Bios is
currently set to use EFI+Legaccy boot, and simply setting the boot order
to the old hd with the bootloader in the MBR and the / array on it came
up just fine, running like a champ.
The daunting part is mapping out the migration to boot from the M.2
via EFI which will move / and swap to the M.2 and provide another 180G
of space for future growth of /srv and /var and an I/O speed boost as well.
So I've got the M.2 formatted, lbaf set for 4096 block size and
partitioned:
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 256 262399 262144 1G EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 262400 1310975 1048576 4G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 1310976 62252543 60941568 232.5G Linux root (x86-64)
and then ran into the wiki issue on whether to mount the ESP as /boot or
/efi and how to prepare the EFI partition to boot so I can shutdown,
boot the Arch installer, copy old / to new, change the fstab and
whatever else is needed (chroot, rebuild initramfs to include the nvme
driver, ?) and then reboot to the new drive and new root.
Whether I mount the ESP as /boot or alternatively as /efi and create
a new /boot directory under / to copy the old boot over is the crossroad
I'm stuck at. I can read the disadvantages and it seems like /efi is the
way to go, but for some reason the installer suggests preparing and
mounting the ESP as /boot directly. The "which is better?" problem.
I don't know if it makes a lot of difference, and that's the problem,
I don't know, and was hoping the brain-trust here could help me decide
between:
1) mount ESP as /boot,
2) mount ESP as /efi, or
3) it doesn't really matter, pick one.
Regardless, it's a good learning exercise in an area I have had
little experience, but it's an area I'd like to get right, hopefully the
first time :)
My thought is to proceed with /efi from the EFI system partition
suggestion unless there is a good reason to stick with /boot from the
Installation guide page. Any thoughts appreciated.
--
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
