HOWTO: Encrypt the system manually upon installation

[hyper_ch]

try to encrypt the boot partition that's not possible... however you could have the /boot partition on a cd-rom or something

and for compiling own kernel.... well, I guess you got a point there

[kevdog]

If you got the space -- most people do since HD space is cheap, I would recommend at least 500 Mb for boot if you plan on either keeping a bunch of old kernels or think you might ever roll your own vanilla kernel. Maybe I just flat out suck at compiling kernels, however I can never make them as small as the kernels compiled by the ubuntu team. I guess thats the difference between a neophyte and professionals. I haven't compiled a kernel in a while, but at least 30-40 Mb of the /boot partition was taken up with my one custom kernel. Everytime I recompiled -- trust me you will need to do the recompilation about 4-5 times the initial attempt to get things right -- I had to delete the previous compiled version first since I was running out of space on the /boot partition.

If you are not into experimenting, then forget everything I'm saying. If you are into experimenting -- make the boot partition bigger than 100 Mb!!

[hyper_ch]

one can also recompile a kernel in a chroot anyway, as I've pointed out, my guide is not so much about how to partition and what size each one shall have than rather doing a manual encrypted install

[kevdog]

Yeah, I know I wandered off topic.

[Thoralyon]

I followed this guide way back and I did so now for a complete reinstall of lucid.

Last time it worked like a charm, but this time I thought I'd mount 2 physical harddrives to /media/xyz and /media/abc
Now i cannot create new folders on those drives, and all the encrypted drives show up in my places folder as locked driveicons, clicking on them nets me an error "unable to mount xGB filesystem, sdy_crypt is mounted"
this is the same behaviour than what appeared after an upgrade to 9.04 or 9.10 I don't quite remember.
How do I get rid of it?
And how to properly mount physical drives if i dont want to mount them as /home, where is the proper place to mount them?

thanks