Arch Linux

slughappy1

Member

Registered: 2009-03-20

Posts: 75

Need help with GRUB and Chainloading TrueCrypts MBR

I am in desperate need of some help. I have a dual boot system, with Arch and Vista. I had everything working, until a couple days ago I kind of erased my boot partition when installing Arch. I have Vista encrypted with TrueCrypt and saved a copy of the MBR that TrueCrypt installed. But I used to follow the guide here, but it no longer is working. Can someone please help me?

I have the TrueCrypt.mbr and TrueCrypt.backup copied to the /boot partition, that is where they were before. And I mean that they are not in the GRUB folder, they are in the same place as the Linux Kernel. But now I need to setup GRUB. I don't know what to put the make GRUB load the truecrypt.mbr

My partition scheme is also,

sda1 -> Vista
sda2 -> Boot
sda3 -> SWAP
sda4 -> /

slughappy1

Member

Registered: 2009-03-20

Posts: 75

Re: Need help with GRUB and Chainloading TrueCrypts MBR

Turns out I needed to add this at the bottom

title Windows Vista/Longhorn
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader (hd0,1)/truecrypt.mbr
boot

na5m

Member

From: Rancho Cordova, CA

Registered: 2008-11-19

Posts: 30

Re: Need help with GRUB and Chainloading TrueCrypts MBR

great info, slug!  i really needed that.  very helpful.  i'm trying to come up with an encryption scheme for my two OS's ( Vista and Arch ).  i only have one physical hard disk in my laptop.  i want Vista on one primary partition, and Arch on another primary partition.  i realize that i may need a third partition for ( unencrypted ) /boot.  and i want to use only TrueCrypt.  i do not want to use LVM or dm-crypt.  i hope i can manage this scenario.  i'll report back if i find success.

i currently have (hd0,0) loaded with Vista (primary partition). i installed TrueCrypt and encrypted (hd0,0). i did not encrypt the whole disk (hd0).
i also have (hd0,1) loaded with Arch (primary partition), no swap partition. all filesystems are mounted under /. nothing encrypted, yet.
i moved truecrypt.mbr to (hd0,1) and installed GRUB to (hd0)

EDIT:  Well, apparently it cannot be done. TrueCrypt will happily encrypt Windows systems.  but TrueCrypt will not encrypt the root ( / ) partition of Linux.
Windows will have to use one encrypting technology, and Linux will have to use another. it would have been nice to need only one technology solution ( ie BitLocker for both Linux and Windows, or LUKS for both Linux and Windows.

Last edited by na5m (2009-04-22 11:15:35)

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