[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Won't boot if /, home, swap are encrypted



‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:29 AM, Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 01:25:09PM +0000, D&P Dimov wrote:
>
> > I did a new install of latest Debian 9.5 stable on a new Dell laptop. Debian is the only OS there now. If I encrypt /, home, and swap, it won't boot after install. If I leave them unencrypted, it boots fine. What am I missing?
> > Thanks!
>
> It will be much easier to help you if you could post the complete output
> of the boot sequence up to the failure. If that is not possible, then
> perhaps the last screenful or last few lines. Or even a photograph of
> the screen showing where the boot sequence is stuck.

To satisfy my curiosity, I fired up a VM and in the VM used the Debian installer to automatically partition for an encrypted install, with separate /, /home, and /swap. It made a 1MB blank partition, 512MiB /boot/efi partition flagged as bootable, 244MiB /boot partition, and allocated the rest of the disk to the LUKS container. In the LUKS container contained /, /home, and /swap. See the attached picture.

After installation was complete, here is the output of lsblk.

NAME                        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                           8:0    0   20G  0 disk
├─sda1                        8:1    0  512M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sda2                        8:2    0  244M  0 part  /boot
└─sda3                        8:3    0 19.3G  0 part
  └─sda3_crypt              254:0    0 19.3G  0 crypt
    ├─debian--vm--vg-root   254:1    0  6.4G  0 lvm   /
    ├─debian--vm--vg-swap_1 254:2    0    2G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
    └─debian--vm--vg-home   254:3    0 10.9G  0 lvm   /home
sr0                          11:0    1 55.3M  0 rom


It seems the best practice is:
1MB blank partition at the beginning of the drive
512MB EFI partition (or larger) mounted at /boot/efi, flagged as bootable
256MB /boot partition (or larger as desired), NOT flagged as bootable.
Then the rest of the drive partitioned as desired (ie a LUKS container)

If all of these conditions are met, then encrypted boot with EFI *should* work correctly.

So I'm at a loss, D&P Dimov, as to why you had difficulty. You said it was a config in your BIOS that you needed to change?

Attachment: Screenshot_2018-10-21_15-13-19.png
Description: PNG image


Reply to: