Re: whole disk encryption -- not prompting for passphrase

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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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