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I've installed Debian (lenny) on a machine at home. It was set up during install to have a /boot partition, then the rest was encrypted, then had an LVM ontop of that, then all the other partitons inside LVM.

After install completed and on first boot it asked for password to un-encrypt(same password for both drives) then it showed an error which said LVM could not find a physical device with a particular UUID or something similar.

LVM install is over two HDs. One is 120GB and one 40GB. 120GB is Master on its IDE cable and this has /boot on it. 40GB is slave on the other IDE cable.

Is there anything that could be done to rescue this install? Or diagnose problem? It took ages to get installed due to time spent enrypting drives and I'd rather not go through that again. :(

Thanks.. Ian

ianfuture
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3 Answers3

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It was set up during install to have a /boot partition, then the rest was encrypted, then had an LVM ontop of that, then all the other partitons inside LVM.

The encryption should be on the LVM-partition level, not the hard drive's partition.

Avery Payne
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When the LVM tools start up, they look for a set of PVs (physical volumes) and the volume groups built out of them, and the logical volumes built inside the VGs.

If you've encrypted your whole 40GB drive (i.e. /dev/hdb1 is encrypted) the problem is most likely that the LVM is starting before the decryption happens - so it goes looking for the PV signature (the UUID it's complaining about), and doesn't find one, because at that point, /dev/hdb1 looks like random junk, not a PV.

Your best bet for rescuing the data would be to pass in your decryption key and then do a pvscan/vgchange -a y/lvchange -a y sequences, since the pvscan will work once the drives are accessible again.

In the future, as Avery notes, encrypt the logical volumes, not the physical drives!

Rodger
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when your creating a /boot participations it has to be ext3 or ext4 because in production it good for recovery !

Rajat
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