Re: Trouble booting lvm raid/luks system with latest kernel in Testing

[deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com>]

Alex Gould wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 4, 2018, at 3:08 PM, deloptes wrote:
>> Alex Gould wrote:
>> 
>> > I imagine I will need to fix some settings for initramfs, grub,
>> > crypttab, fstab, or something, but I'm not sure how to proceed.
>> 
>> I would compare content of new and old initrd
>> 
>> lsinitramfs /boot/initrd-.... > initrd.1.content
>> lsinitramfs /boot/initrd-.... > initrd.2.content
>> 
>> diff -ub initrd.2.content initrd.1.content
>> 
>> is there something missing?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> There were some differences that might be relevant, unfortunately I'm not
> sure what they mean. The first change listed below looks suspicious to me.
> 

Extract the initrd and inspect the '+' new files

> +conf/modules
> +lib/cryptsetup/functions
> +cryptroot/crypttab

finally you have to fix initramfs-tools, to be sure it will create proper
image next time - perhaps consider the answer by tv.debian@googlemail.com
<tv.debian@googlemail.com>

I stopped using systemd as init process long time ago, though keeping it on
the system still creates problems.
As tv.debian@googlemail.com <tv.debian@googlemail.com> reported, it might 
be the changes to initramfs-tools.
I do use the stable version to avoid waste of time in such situations,
however I had many times issues with initrd and what I usually do to debug
and solve is to pass to the kernel boot the option init=/bin/sh. When I
enter in the primitive shell I found out what is the problem as I can
manually decrypt, activate lvm and mount root. After this I cd to the mount
point of root and do following (this 3 lines are worth gold)

exec /usr/sbin/chroot . /bin/sh <<- EOF >dev/console 2>&1
exec /sbin/init ${CMDLINE}
EOF

usually this was necessary when swapping drives, so at the end when I boot I
(re)create initrd

Few times a command or two were missing from the initrd, or devices were not
created etc.

regards