[arch-general] motherboard change - strategies for saving current install?

[David C. Rankin]

On 08/12/2015 09:53 PM, Christian Demsar wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015, at 10:08 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
>> "can I boot the install media, assemble raid arrays, chroot old and
>> update, or do I just dump the root partition and reinstall
>> completely?"
>
> You'll need to reinstall, I think. According to [1], ESP on RAID is not
> a good idea, which means one of your drives will have to host the EFI
> (and also usually boot) partition.
>
> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EFI#ESP_on_RAID
>
> Instead, you can do something similar to the full-disk encryption /
> plausible deniability setup I experimented with a few months ago [2] --
> host the EFI / boot partition on a high quality USB drive instead and
> keep your RAID array intact.
>
> [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system#Plain_dm-crypt
>

Thank you Iru, Aaron and Christian,

   Aaron, the board is a GA-990FXA-UD3, and I will be making use of SATA 5/6 (6 
drives total), so I'll report back on any difficulties with the last two drives. 
My current board (MSI k9n2 SLI platinum) had SATA 1-4 and ESATA 5-6 on board. 
While the 990FXA list the SATA 5-6 as full SATA-III ports, I wouldn't be 
surprised if they were in some way different from the primary/secondary 
controller ports.

   According to the suggestions, I'll first attempt setting the board/BIOS in 
Legacy mode, and attempt to boot/chroot/assemble and rebuild initramfs and 
preserve my existing install (I was quite happy with the pair of carvair blacks 
the system was sitting on)

   If that fails, I'll look at a full reinstall. If that's needed, I'll probably 
just use a pair of new drives, format as GPT for full UEFI and attempt adding 
the existing arrays on the secondary installer after the install is complete.

   Thanks again, this is exactly the plan of attack I needed to get straight in 
my head.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.