To increase reliability I was equipping a file server with a second system hard drive, and the hardware RAID controller wouldn’t let me create a mirror setup without losing the data on the drives. So I chose to use (Linux) software RAID instead, which I am familiar with and which worked well for me in the past.
I couldn’t get the beast to start up for quite a while. The drive order was juggled around during boot, and the box, being proper server hardware, needed ages to boot up, making trial and error even less fun. I always put off grokking UEFI into the future and wanted to kick myself more than once for it.
Well now I finally got around to it, and what can I say.
The legacy MBR stuff was, at best, an undocumented community standard with lots of quirks and hacks. In comparison, UEFI is documented and not too complicated, seems well thought out, and is much more powerful. It’s not my DEC Alpha’s SRM Console, and it’s also not Open Firmware, and if you care about your rights you should run something like coreboot.
But I was happy I got my server to boot up reliably, and I feel stupid for trying to turn UEFI off instead of on for many years.
tl;dr
I wish I had read this article from 2014 on UEFI much sooner:
