Cloned SLES 12.2 won't boot on HPE Proliant DL360 Gen8
Hi freiends,
I have a couple of machines (same hardware) to be set up identical with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.2 and some special application software. The machines run with a RAID1 HDD configuration (mirrored disks).
After completeing the first machine, I did image backups from all partitions (with the tools fsarchiver and partclone from the latest SystemRescueCD) and restored 'em onto the next machine with the same set of tools ( ... yes, I did transfer the partition layout, too). Unfortunately that machine didn't boot up SLES afterwards.
Out of curiosity I installed a plain SLES 12.2 on the machine then and immediately did the image restore afterwards. Now that machine boots up. I presume that the SLES installer writes something into the UEFI BIOS to let the machine boot from the SLES partition.
Is there any way to circumvent that otherwise useless SLES installation step by tweaking the UEFI BIOS settings ?
Is there anything I could/should/must "clone" to the other machine (and, if yes, how) ?
I have a couple of machines (same hardware) to be set up identical with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.2 and some special application software. The machines run with a RAID1 HDD configuration (mirrored disks).
After completeing the first machine, I did image backups from all partitions (with the tools fsarchiver and partclone from the latest SystemRescueCD) and restored 'em onto the next machine with the same set of tools ( ... yes, I did transfer the partition layout, too). Unfortunately that machine didn't boot up SLES afterwards.
Out of curiosity I installed a plain SLES 12.2 on the machine then and immediately did the image restore afterwards. Now that machine boots up. I presume that the SLES installer writes something into the UEFI BIOS to let the machine boot from the SLES partition.
Is there any way to circumvent that otherwise useless SLES installation step by tweaking the UEFI BIOS settings ?
Is there anything I could/should/must "clone" to the other machine (and, if yes, how) ?
ASKER
Thanks for your comment.
I can confirm that this is not a specific RAID problem. The RAID1 is configured with "Intelligent Provisioning" -> "Array Configuration Utility" prior to installing the bitwise clone process. The used LiveLinux (SystemRescueCD) has sufficient drivers for the RAID controlles included, and/or the involved RAID controllers from HP are transparent (means that if they are not accessed thru the right drivers, they work via classic interfaces and appear to the OS like plain vanilla SATA or IDE drives. Maybe not full performance, but full backward compatible).
BTW I've done numerous bitwise clone processes like that before ... but w/o UEFI BIOS.
I presume that this is buried in the UEFI bios settings, where the Linux installer does some settings needed to allow it to boot the OS. What I need should be instructions how to clone these settings, too.
I can confirm that this is not a specific RAID problem. The RAID1 is configured with "Intelligent Provisioning" -> "Array Configuration Utility" prior to installing the bitwise clone process. The used LiveLinux (SystemRescueCD) has sufficient drivers for the RAID controlles included, and/or the involved RAID controllers from HP are transparent (means that if they are not accessed thru the right drivers, they work via classic interfaces and appear to the OS like plain vanilla SATA or IDE drives. Maybe not full performance, but full backward compatible).
BTW I've done numerous bitwise clone processes like that before ... but w/o UEFI BIOS.
I presume that this is buried in the UEFI bios settings, where the Linux installer does some settings needed to allow it to boot the OS. What I need should be instructions how to clone these settings, too.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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ASKER
Found it by myself, and got no other solution
RAID1 means you've got at least two disks, each of which has part of your RAID based data on it... even for simple mirroring...
First off I'd never attempt this, because doing a base level OS install... will just work... first time + every time + likely save many hours of debugging, when something goes wrong...
If I had to do this for some reason, I go through these steps.
1) Shutdown RAID on source machine.
2) Remove one of the disks from source machine + place in a dock on another machine, because any backup you make is guaranteed to fail in mysterious ways, if the system is live when you take a backup... because file systems will be inconsistent, with some data on disk + some cached in memory.
3) Do a bitwise backup of the disk in the dock on a completely different machine.
4) Now try your restore from this disk.
Unless I had 100s of machines to install using this restore disk, I'd just do a normal install + rsync over files from source machine to any target machine.