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xworld

Member

Registered: 2012-05-27

Posts: 153

LUKS passphrase stopped working, then started again?

I turned my computer off a day ago and everything was fine. My computer is full disk encrypted with the boot partition on a separate usb drive. Today, when I went to turn it on and enter the passphrase, it fails and tells me that no passphrase found. I am completely sure that I am entering the correct password because I've been using this password for months and I almost always enter it correctly the first time. I retried literally almost twenty times because I couldn't believe this was happening to me. Feeling frustrated, I turned the computer off and gave up. I decided to try one more time just for good measure, and strangely, the passphrase worked the first time. This is good news I suppose, but it worries me for obvious reasons. What is to stop this from happening again? What made it happen in the first place? I just want to know why that happened so I can find out if there's anything I can do to prevent it in the future. Needless to say, I'm backing my data up now. Thanks for reading.

Last edited by xworld (2015-04-07 17:27:24)

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,489

Re: LUKS passphrase stopped working, then started again?

I've read numerous cases where users failed to unlock with the correct passphrase, because another configuration e.g. of the keymap or encoding changed, but this is not your case I know. I write this on a laptop (TP) where the bios _sometimes_ fails to recognize the trackstick (not a hw problem). Maybe your bios has an issue like such with the keyboard.

To prepare: what you should do too is to use "cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup" to be prepared in case a disk sector in the header dies.

xworld

Member

Registered: 2012-05-27

Posts: 153

Re: LUKS passphrase stopped working, then started again?

Ok, yeah I suppose there's nothing I can do but back it up. Thank you.

Last edited by xworld (2015-04-07 20:07:03)