Greetings to the Debian user community!
I would like to find out before posting the following information to the bugs
list, about a Debian installation problem I am having using encrypted LVM, to
find out whether anyone in the general user community might have some thoughts
on the matter. I have never posted to any Debian mailing list, and wanted to
avoid bothering the valiant volunteers who track and deal with bugs
unnecessarily - I thought I'd bug you folks instead. :-)
The problem I am experiencing was documented on this list nearly a year ago, in
a posting by Giorgos Pallas, to whom I'm cc'ing a copy of this message, at:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2009/07/msg00171.html
It appears, however, that the problem reported there was not really resolved at
the time. To make a long story short, it seems to me that the partitioning
procedure in the installation script for Debian 5.04, which uses "partman,"
will not permit one to create an encrypted LVM partition that is less than the
full size of the device onto which Debian is being installed (though I think it
does create a small unencrypted boot partition as well). However, I know from
my own experience that the installer for Debian 4.0r0, which I have been using
for nearly a couple of years, both allows one to set up encrypted LVM on a
partition one has created within the install procedure, and to select the file
system type used within that partition (the new installer insists on using
ext3).
More serious to me personally is that the older (4.0) installer seems to have
done some damage to the contents of another drive than the one onto which
Debian was being installed (and to which I never referred within the
partitioning procedure). Presumably, the damage was to the partition table
(but beyond what is visible using "fdisk," since it reports the same
information about the partition table as it had before the installation was
started - or perhaps the damage was done elsewhere in the file system,
somewhere that has to do with the "volume group" information on an LVM volume).
Here's the situation.
Since I found myself unable to get the Debian 5.0 installer to create an
encrypted LVM volume on a partition I had created on a new drive (not the one
containing my existing Debian system), I decided to use the 4.0 installer,
since I know I had used it successfully to do what I wanted back when I
installed my current system. My thought was to get the new drive set up the
way I wanted it and then switch to the new installer, skipping the partitioning
step, and let the 5.04 installer do the installation to the new encrypted LVM
partition. I wasn't able to satisfy the old installer script with respect to
there being both a root and a swap partition (for reasons still unknown - it
just never proceeded to the file system creation step on this drive, though
obviously it had worked when I installed Debian to the other drive a couple of
years ago). So I decided to instead see if I could use my existing system to
create what is required.
Here's where the real tragedy became clear - I found myself unable to boot into
the older system - instead of getting the familiar prompt for a LUKS password,
I got two repetitions of a short error message that said that the volume group
(which presumably is known about somewhere on the drive - maybe as part of the
header of the volume or hidden away in the partition table?) was unknown. I
did get a password prompt, but it didn't mention "LUKS."
Since I had a root on another partition on the old drive (which doesn't know
about the LVM partition), I was able to boot into a rudimentary version of
Debian, where I could verify that the partition table looks OK, and that
(judging from the octal dump), the header of what's in the encrypted LVM volume
seems OK (I don't know enough about what should be there, but I see a string of
ASCII characters that look as if they're introducing an LVM header). This fact
would seem to further confirm that if there was damage to the partition table
of the old drive, it wasn't such as to mess up the alignment with what's on the
drive - at least with respect to this partition. (I was careful to never refer
to the old drive within the new installation, either under 5.04 or 4.0, so
partman should not have touched the partition table of that drive, except to
read and report on its contents.)
Before starting the installation, I used "vgdisplay" and "lvdisplay" to look at
the contents of the volume - and I have that information in a file on another
computer. If there is any hope of recovering the LVM volume, I suppose some of
the information contained in this listing might be helpful.
Well, that's pretty much it. If anyone has any thoughts, please post them
here. One more thing is that I have to make a trip to the other side of the
country, where I'll be for a few weeks, in a few days. I had hoped to leave
the machine, which is used as a server, running during my absence.
One more thing - I have no backups of what's on the ~400 GB partition - that's
what I was preparing to do in installing the new (2 TB) drive. If I had it to
do again, I would have uncabled the old drive before starting the procedure, of
course. Now I'm really stuck!
Thanks in advance for any help anyone might be able to provide.
--
Following is some additional information that might be useful for anyone who
might have any ideas about the damage to my existing encrypted LVM partition:
Booting from a filesystem in another partition, I've checked the partition
table, and find that it looks identical to the state it was in prior to my
(unsuccessful - see details below) attempt to install Debian Linux.
I've also used "od" to dump the first part of the partition, and see what looks
as if it might be LVM header information:
0000000 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
*
0001000 L A B E L O N E 001 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0001020 R 247 U J \0 \0 \0 L V M 2 0 0 1
0001040 Y e 6 M R Z 9 U W a H Z a H 0 L
0001060 i 2 8 n V P 4 a 7 w A A G o 0 K
0001100 \0 344 035 037 ] \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 003 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0001120 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0001140 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 020 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0001160 \0 360 002 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
0001200 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
*
0004000 006 337 Y 024 \a j < d i 330 003 371 255 P < *
And here's a listing of the layout of the drive I've been using - before
installing the 2TB drive:
/dev/mapper/vg1-root 26213596 21595380 4618216 83% /
/dev/mapper/vg1-av 298294380 297094200 1200180 100% /av
/dev/mapper/vg1-home 62912636 62195664 716972 99% /home
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4863 39062016 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 4864 4881 144585 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 4882 6097 9767520 e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sda4 6098 60801 439409880 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 6098 12176 48829536 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 12177 60801 390580281 8e Linux LVM
Partition table entries are not in disk order
lvm> vgdisplay vg1
--- Volume group ---
VG Name vg1
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 5
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 4
Open LV 4
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 372.48 GB
PE Size 4.00 MB
Total PE 95356
Alloc PE / Size 95356 / 372.48 GB
Free PE / Size 0 / 0
VG UUID B3DfAi-H30F-vP6E-3k1H-ObG2-xaQQ-QBYddP
--
lvm> lvdisplay vg1
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/vg1/root
VG Name vg1
LV UUID y4ia2y-DB5M-uJEJ-LR8S-G9cY-sV2W-i1uTN6
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 2
LV Size 25.00 GB
Current LE 6400
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 254:1
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/vg1/swap
VG Name vg1
LV UUID oWin9E-upNz-fCdA-gM0P-GRsh-VQdi-hsuV0y
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 2
LV Size 3.00 GB
Current LE 768
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 254:2
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/vg1/home
VG Name vg1
LV UUID n2qJgo-up2G-h1zn-02zP-HVvl-iBU4-Iqtoyf
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 2
LV Size 60.00 GB
Current LE 15360
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 254:3
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/vg1/av
VG Name vg1
LV UUID CHTWpc-Qszq-XGhR-BN01-X9hA-t3Zu-7IuveY
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 2
LV Size 284.48 GB
Current LE 72828
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 254:4
--
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