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Operating Systems Linux Ubuntu Cannot access or boot encrypted drive (gave up waiting for root device...) Post 302962312 by David4321 on Friday 11th of December 2015 04:44:33 PM
Old 12-11-2015
Hammer & Screwdriver Cannot access or boot encrypted drive (gave up waiting for root device...)

I cannot access or boot from my C drive. I'm running Zorin 9 and the drive is a Samsung SSD. The disk was encrypted on install, and that has not given me any problems before.


When I start the system it gets to the memory test page, and does not then load the password prompt, which it used to. I can go to password manually by pressing "Enter (Boot)", but it does not accept correct password. I have tried cap lock. I know keyboard is good, I have tried wired and wireless keyboards. I checked the disk recently with GSmartControl, and it passed with no comments. Upon attempting password I get "cryptsetup failed". After several attempts I get an error "gave up waiting for boot device". Image


When plugged into windows externally, this drive with the data I want doesn't show up in the drive list as searchable, but it does show up in "safely remove hardware", and in drive management. In drive management, it shows as 2 partitions, both reporting as healthy, one at 243mb, the other at 232.65gb. The drive is formatted to ext2, and with windows drivers, the smaller partition (with grub) displays in drive list, but not the data partition, formatted to raw.


Questions:
1) Does this seem most likely to be a software or hardware problem?
If a software problem:
2) I noticed that it lists the OS it is looking for as being on sda5_crypt, not sure how there could be 5 partitions on that device (it's only 250gb) unless that is part of the encryption protocol. I never noticed the partition designation before, the only thing I put on that drive is the OS, I never manually created any other partitions. Could it just be looking for the wrong partition? Is there a way to check this?
3) Is there a way to repair the boot sector, change the encryption key, or reinstall the OS from DVD without booting up, AND preserve all existing personal data? (fortunately, there's not that much on this drive)
4) I've been thinking of moving from Zorin to Ubuntu OS anyway, and my first thought was that this is an opportunity for that. Is there a way to install Ubuntu and preserve the data?
If a hardware problem:
5) Is there a way to back up and salvage the encrypted data on this disk?

Thanks for any help!
 

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HD(4)							     Linux Programmer's Manual							     HD(4)

NAME
hd - MFM/IDE hard disk devices DESCRIPTION
The hd* devices are block devices to access MFM/IDE hard disk drives in raw mode. The master drive on the primary IDE controller (major device number 3) is hda; the slave drive is hdb. The master drive of the second controller (major device number 22) is hdc and the slave hdd. General IDE block device names have the form hdX, or hdXP, where X is a letter denoting the physical drive, and P is a number denoting the partition on that physical drive. The first form, hdX, is used to address the whole drive. Partition numbers are assigned in the order the partitions are discovered, and only non-empty, non-extended partitions get a number. However, partition numbers 1-4 are given to the four partitions described in the MBR (the `primary' partitions), regardless of whether they are unused or extended. Thus, the first logi- cal partition will be hdX5. Both DOS-type partitioning and BSD-disklabel partitioning are supported. You can have at most 63 partitions on an IDE disk. For example, /dev/hda refers to all of the first IDE drive in the system; and /dev/hdb3 refers to the third DOS `primary' partition on the second one. They are typically created by: mknod -m 660 /dev/hda b 3 0 mknod -m 660 /dev/hda1 b 3 1 mknod -m 660 /dev/hda2 b 3 2 ... mknod -m 660 /dev/hda8 b 3 8 mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb b 3 64 mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb1 b 3 65 mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb2 b 3 66 ... mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb8 b 3 72 chown root:disk /dev/hd* FILES
/dev/hd* SEE ALSO
mknod(1), chown(1), mount(8), sd(4) Linux 1992-12-17 HD(4)
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