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Naftuli Kay
Asked: 2014-03-25 13:42:56 +0800 CST

LUKS and LVM install: no boot (gave up waiting for root device)

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I just finished installing 12.04 on my system, configuring it with LUKS and LVM.

I can open the encrypted position just fine in a recovery disk, but I just can't seem to get it to boot.

It waits quite a while for the root partition, then explodes with errors on how it couldn't find the root device:

ALERT! /dev/mapper/vgcryptotop-lvcryptotoproot does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

I then get the initramfs prompt. I have tried running cryptsetup to open the disk from here, but it replies that cryptsetup isn't found by the shell.

I think that somehow, the OS was installed without LUKS and/or LVM. How do I fix this problem? How can I test my theory?

12.04

1 Answers

  1. Make sure dm-crypt.ko is in your initramfs. If it's NOT, it won't be able to mount the / filesystem and that's probably why you see the error.

    chroot or just mount the /boot or / filesystem and do a /sbin/lsinitramfs initrd.img-$(uname -r)

    You should see something like below (from a Debian wheezy box)

    /boot# lsinitramfs initrd.img-`uname -r` | grep dm
...
lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/md/dm-crypt.ko
...

    If it's NOT, you may have to chroot into the system from a live CD (e.g. system rescue cd) and regenerate initramfs -> update-initramfs -u -k all.

    Boot and see if it helps, if all good, you should be prompt to input the passphrase for the encryption key.

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