%s does not exist, dropping to a shell

[karlzap]

So I've been trying to test Mint 16 in emulation. We're talking a clean install here, not an upgrade from 15.

I had previously gotten Mint 15 to install on an encrypted LVM correctly, but with one problem: I could not figure out how to get a separate home partition. The goal is to have one LVM encrypted partition: within the LVM partition, three sub-partitions: slash (aka "/") swap and home.

So today I tried a Mint 16 install on a fresh virtual machine. It was as before, no real way to put that third partiton & its mount point within the encrypted LVM. I attempted to run gparted and that crashed. So I rebooted from gparted live CD. Was able to set up all but the LVM within gparted. From the command-line, I was able to set up the LVM with Luks and was then able to create the sub-partitions within.

I then rebooted again, this time from the mint 16 CD. I ran the installer, partially, just enough so that I could see that the visible partitions were as I had set them. Exiting the installer I ran a shell, did cryptsetup etc. Ran the installer. It saw all the partitions, including the ones within. Yay. Was able to set mount points as per my goal: /boot in a non-ecnrypted regular partition, then "/", swap and "/home" within the encrypted LVM.

Shut down. Ejected the emulated CD. Booted off the emulated hard drive.

Got an error during boot. Something about "/dev/mapper/bunnies-root does not exist. dropping to a shell" This dropped me to a (initramfs) prompt. Bad in that boot stopped. But good in that my chosen device name has been retained.

I attempted to begin the mounting process again, but failed at the first command: "cryptsetup" was not recognized as a command. One would suspect this is because cryptsetup, and related commands, are in the "/" partition ... the one that can't be mounted.

I was able to type "reboot" which then put me into a grub menu. This last is encouraging: it means the grub install was not screwed up.

So, at this point, I have a Mint that won't boot ... but I have the feeling it would not take much to fix it. I just don't know how. Is this situation ringing any bells? If so could you clue me in please? thank you very much.

p.s. In the meantime, I'll try to remember how to chroot from a liveCD and see what I can ascertain that way.

[karlzap]

Looks like [url=http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=151677]others are having this problem also?[/url]

Anyway, I set up the chroot and mounted everything. That worked but it did not solve my actual problem.

In a second emulated machine, I installed Mint again this time, letting it use the default option of wiping the entire disk and using its system (only "/" and swap partitions within the encrypted LVM). The intent here was to look at the grub configuration to ascertain the parameter passed to the kernel to get it to realize that it was dealing with an encrypted LVM partition and behave accordingly. Welllllll, it seems grub has changed since I last played with it. I have no idea what's going on. Near as I can tell, there is no --hey-turkey-mount-that-lvm-first-before-trying-to-mount-stuff parameter being passed to the kernel by grub.

Theory must yield to hard experimentation. The facts have been revealed: Mint 16 is not actually able to do hard disk encryption except for the one special case of Mint's single scheme of "/" & swap ONLY.