Bug 23878

Summary:	UEFI boot drives are not swappable between identical systems
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	William Kenney <wilcal.int>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	marja11
Version:	6	Keywords:	7beta1, NEEDINFO
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:		CVE:
Status comment:

Description William Kenney 2018-11-21 20:07:35 CET

Description of problem:

About 3-years ago I purchased two identical basic systems, A & B. MoBo,
I5 processor, 8GB DRAM, Power supply. Everything absolutely the same.
One system is my always on server ( A ), the other ( B ) is mostly a mirror
image of A. I run a simple rsync of A to B just about every day of nfs
directorys on A such that everything critical on A is rsync'd to B.
Up to now I have been using MBR boot for both systems. Both systems
have identical HD Hot Swap trays. If the A Harddrive goes down I can boot
to a USB stick and swap in the drive from B and install it in A and reboot
to a working system. That process only takes a few minutes and works just
fine.

I am determined to switch both systems to UEFI for M7. I have discovered
that the above process does not work any more. I can install M7 using
the x86_64 Plasma Live-DVD on A, that works fine. But if using the same
Live-DVD a UEFI install on B then moving that drive over to system A it
will not boot.

I kinda figured this may not work as one of the features of UEFI I think
is the prevention of doing just this. Is this something that we would
expect would work or is UEFI really working as expected? I have not
tried this using M6. I'm going to assume it will do the same thing.

Yes, I do change the BIOS boot from Legacy to UEFI.

Thanks.

Comment 1 Marja Van Waes 2018-11-22 10:00:47 CET

Hi Kenny,

And the UUIDs on both machines are *exactly* the same?

CC: (none) => marja11
Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

Comment 2 William Kenney 2018-11-22 14:12:46 CET

I believe that the UUID would be different for the two systems.
Something I think that UEFI specifically prohibits you from doing.
I think.

Comment 3 William Kenney 2018-11-22 17:15:39 CET

Sorry, I spoke too quickly. I have not changed the UUID of the HD as I swapped the drive back and froth between the two systems. I was thinking of the unique Bios Motherboard Serial number that is different between the two systems. I think I read somewhere the one of the features of UEFI is that when it is installed on one system it records that Serial number in the boot process and that prohibits the drive from being moved to another system. I will do more research on this.

Comment 4 William Kenney 2018-11-22 17:42:53 CET

If I go through this process with M6 MBR during the boot process there
is a message presented that says "detecting new hardware" and when that
is finished the boot to a working GUI proceeds normally. I have even
swapped drives between two systems that are very dissimilar.  This may
not be fixable. I just wanted to bring up this issue so we have a record
of it.

Comment 5 William Kenney 2018-11-23 22:21:07 CET

I have repeated this test using:

Mageia-7-beta1-Live-Plasma-x86_64.iso

and installing MBR boot. Install went fine, update went fine.
I then was able to move the drive into either system which
booted to a working desktop just fine.

William Kenney 2018-12-20 21:44:35 CET

Keywords: (none) => 7beta1

Comment 6 William Kenney 2019-03-05 19:22:28 CET

I'm going to change this to WONTFIX as I think it's outside or ability to fix.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => WONTFIX