Error setting up encrypted RAID swap

**Karl1982** · May 6th, 2010

Used the whole disk as RAID1 with LVM containing ext2 /boot, ext4 /, and swap, worked fine.

After that, I tried it without any RAID, leaving the second drive unpartitioned. I made 256MB ext2 /boot, and the rest as encryption, put LVM on top of the encryption, and created ext4 / and swap. Also worked fine.

None of this is much of a stretch from what I tried to do originally, so I'm at a loss as to why it's not working. Can you think of anything else I might try to narrow the problem down?

**Karl1982** · May 6th, 2010

Well, I finally fixed it, although I still can't quite explain the problem. You won't believe what it came down to. What I did was I created all the volumes in the layout I really wanted, told it to use them as what they should be (with the exception of swap which I left unused), and I forced it to commit changes and format them by going back into the LVM menu. I just hit finish on the LVM menu, then hit go back at the partitioning menu, which brought up the main menu for the installation. I went to the bottom and told it to abort. It shut down and rebooted.

When I got back to the partitioning menu, my two software RAID1 volumes were still there, but they were both marked as empty. I proceeded to set them up again as I had before, and at the very end, gave it the mount points in logical order (ext4 as /, ext2 as /boot, and finally swap). The installation completed normally, and now it's running beautifully.

What caused me to get the idea to partition, cancel, and then start over and reuse them was that it seems to periodically get a funny idea about what a partition is. After a while I noticed sometimes after setting up identical partitions on the drives, one of them would be unused, and the one on the other drive would be ext2 or ext4 or something like that. Almost like it wasn't writing out changes correctly and reading in some old data from the partition table. I wrote an empty partition table to both disks as my first step every time, so there really shouldn't have been anything like that in there. I even deleted the virtual disks and gave it a pair of "factory unformatted" clean ones once or twice.

The other oddity I noticed is it prompted me for postfix config options right after installing the base system... then afterward asked me which components I would like to install (LAMP, Mail, OpenSSH, etc...). Very strange indeed.

Anyway, thanks for all your help. We may have to compare notes on a few other subjects in the future. Here's my victory screenshot showing my final partition layout (sdb is off the bottom, but it looks just like sda):

**JayRobert** · May 6th, 2010

That's very interesting! I didn't take a screenshot when I finished, but it looked different; I think the encrypted volumes showed the mount points, not the LVs. When I look at disk utility, it shows them as separate peripheral devices (i.e., hard disks) that are unpartitioned. So I think we've skinned the cat two different ways, anyway.

Also, now that you mention it, I think I discovered the reboot trick after setting up LVM by accident as well. I'm not very good at keeping track of how I get things done; much more likely to keep at it by trial and error till it works, which is great until I have to redo it for whatever reason that I failed to foresee.

Also, I got the postfix config options and the server options as well. Perhaps whoever wrote the setup program assumed that anyone who would set up encrypted LVM RAID must be setting up a server.

Glad it's working for you now!

**tonywhelan** · October 22nd, 2010

[QUOTE=Karl1982;9245874]Well, I finally fixed it, although I still can't quite explain the problem. You won't believe what it came down to.....
/QUOTE]

Glad you got it working, BUT can I ask you if you actually tested the RAID by booting with one disk only?

I can build an encrypted RAID 1 array with 10.04 without any errors, using the standard process you first used; but if I then boot with just one disk (either) the system never prompts for my encryption passphrase so it goes nowhere(though I have set the system as boot degraded = TRUE, so it should boot).

I had originally given up on Ubuntu for RAID, and tried Centos 5.5 which was easy to set up and it booted fine with just 1 disk. But CentOS doesn't support the network card chip in my machine, and trying to work around that was a nightmare.

Your earlier observation about lack of support for encrypted RAID is still true, I've found nothing so far that explains this.