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n0yau

Member

Registered: 2025-09-02

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Partitioning a LUKS block device.

I have a 4 TB hard drive encrypted with LUKS for backing up my system.

Should I just be formatting it directly and calling it a day or be partitioning it with GPT on a single partition?

I'm not sure what the difference, if any, between the two methods would be.
Should I ever be using a partition-less disk?

Thanks.

[SOLUTION]
You shouldn't be using LUKS on a raw block device.

Last edited by n0yau (2025-09-16 21:06:10)

frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,574

Re: [SOLVED] Partitioning a LUKS block device.

LUKS should be on a partition. If you need partitions inside LUKS, that's not directly supported; you could do it with kpartx, but it's more common to use LVM, or a filesystem that provides its own subvolume management.