F9 to F10 upgrade, now can't boot encrypted disk

ottow · #1 4th October 2009, 04:54 PM

I just upgraded my F9 system to F10 using they preupgrade method, and though nothing seems to have failed during the upgrade I can't boot my system any longer.

I have a completly encrypted system, and so I need to enter a passphrase at boot. The new F10 system does boot and I do get a Password: prompt but the passphrase is not accepted.
My passphrase doesn't contain any odd characters to prevent problems with keyboard mappings. Just plain letters (upper and lower case) and digits....

Anyone have any thoughts on this? I am pretty desperate here...

/Otto

JEO · #2 4th October 2009, 07:01 PM

Boot from a Fedora 9 live CD and use it to access your encrypted partitions and backup your user data somewhere like to an external usb drive?

ottow · #3 4th October 2009, 07:06 PM

Ok, I made _some_ headway here, mainly thanks to this post:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=203281
This was also helpful:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=165808

Booting F11 LiveUSB I am able to mount the encrypted partitions, so now I have access to my data again. Phew...

It seems the problem booting the upgraded F10 system is related to the system not beeing able to see the Logical volumes inside the Volume group
Somewhere in the config on my broken F10 system there should be a reference to these settings, but I am not certain where...

ottow · #4 4th October 2009, 07:09 PM

Jeo; Yes, this is my fallback plan. But there's 4.5TB of data on the disk.. A bit of a problem backing all that up.
And the server itself will take some significant time to configure, so I want to avoid a re-install if at all possible.

JohnVV · #5 4th October 2009, 08:22 PM

ottow for next time
in the past 4 years i have NEVER had a " upgrade " work correctly .
a FRESH INSTALL is the recommended way

I put the OS on a small 12 gig partition and have a 160 gig partition for my data and the programs I build .This way if i need to reinstall or do a fresh install i do not have to worry about losing it . It is also backed up .

ottow · #6 4th October 2009, 10:31 PM

Yes, I agree. Upgrades are to be avoided in favor of fresh installs. However I can't go back now, and I'd like to at least try to fix it before giving up.

My findings so far points to that grub somehow is invoved, but I may be wrong.
Entering the passphrase during boot unlocks the encrypted Volume group, but grub fails to init and make available the Logical volumes inside it so the system can continue booting.
It is unclear to me how this is supposed to work; I can't find any references in the /boot to any form of volume handling... Google is not my friend in this case either.

I have compared the F10 (/boot and grub in particular) config with my previous F9 config but I can't find anything that strikes me as incorrect.
It is as if F10 lacks functionallity F9 had... But that can't be?

JohnVV · #7 4th October 2009, 10:58 PM

grub did change from fedora 9 to 10
the inode went from 128 to 256
did you read the install notes
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/releas...allation_notes

more i can not add i skipped fedora 10 and did a fresh install of 11
the 8 to 9 upgrade did not work ( i tried )

JEO · #8 5th October 2009, 12:27 AM

If you are getting to the point where it asks you to enter a passphrase then it is not a grub problem, as it has already found and loaded your kernel and initial ramdisk file. Also since you upgraded, I highly doubt that the inode size changed from 128 to 256, as this requires a reformat to happen.

What I would try is boot a rescue or install cd/dvd for F10 into the rescue mode, try to unlock your encrypted drive, then issue a vgscan command, then recreate your initial ramdisk file in the /boot directory with mkinitrd command.

ottow · #9 5th October 2009, 07:56 AM

JEO; Thanks for the idea! I'll give it a go and see if it helps.

/Otto

ottow · #10 5th October 2009, 08:04 PM

Nope, mkinitrd didn't work. Or maybe it's me...

I can generate a new initrd-x.x.x.x.x.img under /boot just fine, using the old fstab as input. No difference though, upon reboot I still get to enter the passphrase twice (as opposed ot once with the F9 system I had before this "upgrade") and then it says:

Command failed: Can not access device
Command failed: Can not access device
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Volume group "VolGroup02" not found
Unable to access resume device (UUID=35418892-b391-4514-983a-f69e925a8e27)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: No such file or directory

When generating the new initrd image in verbose mode (-v), I see it detecting my encrypted volumes just fine (Vol and Log groups), loading the encryption modules, the 3ware RAID module and some other modules.
I have compared the modules.d contents from the old F9 system with the upgraded F10 system and they are identical.
modules.conf is empty on both.

I don't think I can get any further by myself. Anyone have any ideas?

Nasty idea: I do have a complete backup of the system directories (/boot /root /sbin /etc /var /bin /lib /usr and so on) that is about a month old. If I where to delete all system directories from the broken F10 system and then restore them from the backup, would that get me up and running again?
Of course I would loose all system changes between then and now (but I suppose I could preserve logs and so forth)...

/Otto