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farfuglinn94

Member

Registered: 2023-12-30

Posts: 7

LUKS-encrypted partition cannot be decrypted after force shutdown

Hello everyone! I have encountered certain troubles with my filesystem, and I really hope it can be recovered.

My setup consists of two physical drives nvme0n1 and nvme1n1 The first one contains a legacy BIOS partition nvme0n1p1, an UEFI ESP partition nvme0n1p2 and a LUKS2 encrypted partition nvme0n1p3 which contains most of the filesystem. There is a LVM layer over nvme0n1p3 and nvme1n1p1, having separate volumes to mount root, /usr, /var and /home, the latter covering last 500 GB of nvme0n1p3 and the entirety of nvme1n1p1.

Tonight I performed a system update, using regular yay -Syu and regenerated the initramfs image with sudo mkinitcpio -P. However, after rebooting the system was stuck at Plymouth for a bit, and then showed a message that the console could not be initiated because of the root account lock. No matter what I did, I could not unblock it and proceed with system login.  After disabling SecureBoot and booting into LiveUSB I decided to try and mount the filesystem manually. However I noticed that I could not decrypt nvme0n1p3 using the regular passphrase returing me the following error in the process. I could not use TPM because of the disabled secure boot and the recovery key set up by systemd-cryptenroll seems lost. Here's the output of the luksDump for this partition. Weirdly enough, I was able to successfully decrypt nvme1n1p1, as it is shown here, using the same passphrase since it was shared for both encrypted volumes. Unfortunately since most of the system resides on the nvme0n1p3, together with LVM headers, I could not neither mount nor get inside properly.l

I would highly appreciate any help and will readily provide any further details needed, at least what I can gather from my quite limited liveUSB environment. Thanks in advance!

P.S. sorry for poor formatting, typing from phone

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2ce54a7a

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,490

Re: LUKS-encrypted partition cannot be decrypted after force shutdown

Be wary the keymap you use in recovery is the same as the system.

and /home, the latter covering last 500 GB of nvme0n1p3 and the entirety of nvme1n1p1

If you created an LVM across the devices, you might need to activate it before unlocking a volume. Did you try that?

# vgscan
# vgchange -ay
# cryptsetup ...