[SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

jalu · 2011-04-12 04:07:21

I have been trying to set up system encryption with an existing Arch install. I have taken the following steps (based on the Wiki article), but for some reason can no longer boot.

Steps:

* Backed everything up
* Overwrote /dev/sda with random data
* Created three partitions on /dev/sda: a boot partition (/dev/sda1), a swap partition (/dev/sda2), and a root partition (/dev/sda3)
* Set up swap on /dev/sda2
* Set up LUKS on /dev/sda3
* Moved my original /boot directory over to /sda1

When I power on, grub does not start. Instead, I see only a flashing underscore. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for all of the help (and for being one of the best communities out there).

Last edited by jalu (2011-04-15 14:32:53)

JackH79 · 2011-04-12 06:55:13

Did you go through this?

jnguyen · 2011-04-12 07:07:14

As a side note, you probably want to encrypt your swap as well. User data may get swapped out and thus become accessible. There are instructions for this on the LUKS arch wiki page.

jalu · 2011-04-12 17:52:08

jnguyen wrote:

As a side note, you probably want to encrypt your swap as well. User data may get swapped out and thus become accessible. There are instructions for this on the LUKS arch wiki page.

Yes, I did set up swap encryption as the LUKS wiki page describes. Thanks for the important note.

JackH79 wrote:

Did you go through this?

Not completely. Running grub-install did seem to help though -- right now, the grub shell does appear upon boot. I'll try to work through the whole process and report back as soon as possible.

Otherwise, does it seem that I'm mostly on the right path? This is my first time playing with encryption, so I hope this to be a learning experience more than anything.

jalu · 2011-04-14 02:13:47

Hey everyone. Thank you again for all of the great help -- you have been much more helpful by far than any of the other groups I have asked.

At the moment, GRUB loads and begins to load Linux (thanks, JackH79!). However, Linux does not prompt me for my LUKS password and complains that /dev/mapper/root does not exist. I don't understand this -- /dev is encrypted on the LUKS partition, so how *could* this exist at this point?

For whatever it's worth, my menu.lst looks like this. Thanks again for all of the great help!

kveras · 2011-04-15 13:06:09

I would highly recommend this guide:

http://www.pindarsign.de/webblog/?p=767

I have used it a couple of times without problem. That is, if you decide to do it from the beginning again.

jalu · 2011-04-15 14:32:17

Great call, kveras. I did read through that while working on this. I might want to take a second look at it, just to be sure I'm not missing anything. Thanks!

For the moment, #5 has been resolved. To fix my issue, I added the "encrypt" hook to mkinitcpio.conf and re-installed the kernel. I do have a weird issue where root is mounted as read-only, but I opened a separate ticket for that.

I now consider this thread to be solved. Thank you all for all of the excellent help!

Arch Linux

#1 2011-04-12 04:07:21

[SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#2 2011-04-12 06:55:13

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#3 2011-04-12 07:07:14

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#4 2011-04-12 17:52:08

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#5 2011-04-14 02:13:47

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#6 2011-04-15 13:06:09

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

#7 2011-04-15 14:32:17

Re: [SOLVED] Setting up system encryption... cannot boot!

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