On Thu, Mar 09, 2017 at 09:04:56PM -0800, David Christensen wrote:
I use LUKS swap (random key) and root (passphrase). I think it's the piece
of the boot chain that gives me the LUKS prompt for root (before the GRUB
menu).
You get that prompt *before* GRUB?
I use LUKS everywhere and only get it after, because the prompt is (normally)
issued from my initrd.
So, the moral of the story appears to be:
When taking an image of a Debian system drive, be sure to copy the
blocks between the partition table and the first partition, as there
may be boot loader code there.
I'd always put a step 0) in there: is imaging what you want to do? Consider
a file-level backup with rsync (etc etc, as discussed elsewhere in this
thread)