I had trouble booting the last few kernels that came out in 11.10 (3.0.0-16 and 17), and alas the same trouble with booting 12.04 which I installed today.<\/p>\n
My root filesystem is encrypted, and I expect during the boot process to get a prompt for the encryption password. This doesn’t happen, and instead the boot drops into busybox. I was able to just keep using 3.0.0-15 under 11.10 but now that 12.04 is installed I can’t do that anymore. Actually have to try to track this down. .<\/p>\n
After a lot of digging around, I haven’t completely got it figured out, but I did find some hints in this tread: https:\/\/bugs.launchpad.net\/ubuntu\/+source\/cryptsetup\/+bug\/874774<\/a>\u00a0which gave me a start, and at least enabled me to boot. The thread describes a mixup in matching device names from udev to names in \/etc\/crypttab. If a match isn’t found, you don’t get a prompt for a password, the device doesn’t get luksOpened, and the boot fails waiting for it. So, the trick is to ensure the matching logic finds a match between the udev devname and the entry in \/etc\/crypttab. I actually didn’t even have an entry in \/etc\/crypttab for the root device. Silly me. I had entries for a couple of other encrypted devices. I would love to report that all I had to do was put in an entry in \/etc\/crypttab and it all worked. I alas not – I haven’t yet managed to get the problem solved. But I now know where to look, and more importantly reading the thread mentioned did make clear the short term workaround, which may be clear to everyone but me: it didn’t occur to me that once I dropped into busybox, I could just do cryptsetup luksOpen \/dev\/sde3 sde3_crypt, type in the correct password, and then exit busybox. The boot process resumes and is successful.<\/p>\n Update: In the normal course of Ubuntu updates I got 3.2.24 and the problem spontaneously healied itself. Now upon boot, I get an early prompt for the root password. Bob’s your uncle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had trouble booting the last few kernels that came out in 11.10 (3.0.0-16 and 17), and alas the same trouble with booting 12.04 which I installed today. My root filesystem is encrypted, and I expect during the boot process to get a prompt for the encryption password. This doesn’t happen, and instead the boot … Continue reading Ubuntu 12.04 and luks encrypted root drive<\/span>