[TriLUG] Booting LUKS

[Thomas Gardner]

On 6/30/12, Brian McCullough <bdmc at bdmcc-us.com> wrote:
> More particularly, it presents the prompt, writes some more messages to
> the screen, and pauses.  I enter the appropriate password and hit Enter.

``some more messages...''

Well, I don't have an answer for you, but there might be something
interesting burried in these messages.  In fact, inspiration for
finding the root cause might come from some of the messages that whiz
past before you even get to this.

Does your machine have a serial port?  If so, this might be helpful:
Add to your kernel command line something like:

  console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0

(ur sumsuch) and add whatever drivers you may need to your initfs
to make your serial port work.  Then you can hook a healthy machine
to the serial port of the sick machine via a null modem cable and
boot that sucker up, logging the console of the sick machine with the
healthy machine using your favorite comm software.  Of course it may
take a little fooling around to get the comm parameters right....

This will do a couple things for you:

1) You'll be able to log everything that happens during boot so you
can go over the whole boot sequence slowly and carefully looking for
other clues.  Of course, you can also post it here if you want some
help with that.  It's hard to post what you don't have....

2) Based on the other things you said in your original post, I'd say
that once you get the whole serial console thing working, there's
a good chance you'll be able to send your passwd through the serial
console and it would work right.  At that point, the machine should
come up the rest of the way, and you can look for more clues in logs
and dmesg and whatnot.

On the other hand, if your machine doesn't have a serial port, you
might be able to at least look at logs for more clues just by bringing
the thing up with a rescue CD and poking around in the log directory.
Of course, that may or may not work depending on how far up the machine
gets before it goes all funky on you.

I don't know how clever those ideas are, but I thought it might be
worth a shot.

L8r,
tg.