Mint 13 full disk encryption

[posterberg]

Pre-Scriptum. I copied this from the newbie section to here, since I feel it is more of an installation problem even though I am a Mint n00b.

Hi!

I am brand new to Mint, have onle done quick tests in VMWare so far haven't got my first base install working yet. I am however not new at all to Linux, having run Linux since -92 starting with Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu and will now give Mint a try. The primary reason for switch from Ubuntu is Unity/Gnome 3. I am extremelly happy to see Mate and the efforts it make to keep "Gnome2" alive.

I do however need disk encryption and going Mint without full disk encryption is not an option. I have tried http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/344 several times but it doesn't seem to run well on Mint 13. The provided script can firstly not start with sudo as that won't start Ubiquity, I tried in a terminal and I couldn't get Ubiquity to start with sudo. I saw that the script provided in the tutorial added sudo to every cmd that needs to run as root so I decided to just start the script without sudo. This didn't work as the script checked that it ran as root, so I removed that check. That completed a full run.

Still doesn't work, system won't boot when restarted. I found out that the line reading, echo "lvm_crypt UUID=$(ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep $(basename ${DEVICE_TARGET}2) | cut -d ' ' -f 9) none luks" >> /etc/crypttab, didn't work as intended on my system. It actually got the datestamp inserted to the UUID parameter so I had to change cut -d' ' -f 9 to cut -d' ' -f 10 instead.

I was happy and hoping that this would actually help but I still get dropped to busybox after a install and reboot and my system complains about not finding the root device.

I tried to luksOpen the device in busybox and open the lvm devices which worked, but my system kernel panics after that. I probably iniate the system incorrectly after this. I am not 100% how to do this from busybox. I am however positive that the actuall install went ok, but I fail to get Grub to decrypt the disk on boot.

This is my steps in busybox
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 lvm_crypt
lvm vgscan -v
lvm vgchange -a y
lvm lvs --all
return


Has anyone got this working in Mint 13?

/Peter

[posterberg]

I tried changing the last return inside busybox to exit. This boots my full-disk encrypted installation.

How do I add the above to grub so that it performs all the unlock commands automagically upon boot?

Thank you!

[posterberg]

Hi!

I just wanted to report back that some startup script must have modified my boot scripts after my manual busybox boot. All boot after my first, and only, manual boot works perfectly.

I think doing what I wrote in my first post will help anyone to get full disk encryption working in Mint 13.

Thanks,

Peter

[michaelm]

This process works great for Mint 14 (and is trivial)

http://www.conneco.co.uk/Full-Disk-Encr ... t-14-Nadia

HTH