Re: whole disk encryption -- not prompting for passphrase

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

On Monday 20 October 2008 19:13, Hatta wrote:
> Yes, I have run 'update-initramfs -v -u -k 2.6.24-1-686'
>
> This had no effect.
>
> I cannot find any documentation as to how the system is supposed to find
> and
> unencrypt encrypted drives.  When in the boot process is the system
> supposed to load these drives?  What commands does it use?  In what files
> do those commands
> reside?  Where is the documentation for this stuff?  All I can find are
> HOWTOs,
> which contain absolutely no theory, and so are absolutely useless for
> troubleshooting.
>
> Can *anybody* help me with this?

  I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but you can investigate from
within busybox, within limits, of course -- the "mount" command is
available, and you can step through the various start-up scripts in
the initramfs.  Try booting with "break=mount" as a kernel argument,
and see how things look from inside -- this will dump you into
busybox just before the root fs gets mounted.  The kernel command
line is in /proc/cmdline, so you can see if the bootloader maybe
made hamburger out of your parameters.

  Failing that, you can unpack the initramfs (it's a cpio archive)
onto a convenient system and step through the boot process manually -- 
almost everything in there is a shell script, and I think they start with
/sbin/init, or something equally obvious.

  The initramfs's search strategy has got to be in there, and I bet
it's not complicated.  I recently untangled some net-booting issues
this way.

				-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net