Arch Linux

tonttu

Member

Registered: 2023-11-12

Posts: 7

Locked out of an encrypted drive

I have a 4-month old Arch Linux install with the "LVM on LUKS" setup following the Wiki. It worked fine. I've rebooted my computer dozens of times.

I didn't touch the laptop for a month then did a pacman -Syu earlier today. Everything updated fine, but there were some 200 updates, so I figured I might as well reboot. Now the install won't accept my decrypt password.

I tried about 50 times. Then I pulled out a text file where I had written the pw for situations like this, so I know I'm not misremembering. It won't be accepted no matter how many times I type it. I even tried different keyboard layouts just in case that was the issue. Caps lock is not on etc.

Is there some hidden lockout in dm-crypt I might've triggered beyond it taking a while to prompt me again with "Enter passphrase for -dev-nvme0n1p2:"? Because I can't find anything about such a thing on the web.

Like I said I have the password written down so I know I haven't forgotten it. And it's always worked fine before before the updates (which may be totally coincidental).

frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,647

Re: Locked out of an encrypted drive

luksDump? does it work from live image?

luks does not have hidden lockouts. wrong passphrase (keyboard layout, etc.) or corrupted header. or a bug in cryptsetup, that happened in the past too but that was years ago...

if it works from live cd then it could be a missing kernel module or similar issue in your initramfs, and rebuilding initramfs might fix it

if you changed partitioning recently, it could be an alignment issue, if LUKS uses 4K sector size the partition has to be multiple of 4K in size, not an odd number of sectors. it would accept your passphrase but fail to open anyway

for luks2/argon2 it could also be bad ram. run a memtest, and/or disable xmp (ram overclocking) in bios

Last edited by frostschutz (2024-01-31 12:10:34)

tonttu

Member

Registered: 2023-11-12

Posts: 7

Re: Locked out of an encrypted drive

I'll try that today. I should also mention that while updating Pacman had some "invalid or corrupt" keys so I had to delete and repopulate the keyring. Not sure why that would matter, but thought I'd mention since those are pretty much the only things I did.