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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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installboot(1M) 														   installboot(1M)

NAME
installboot - install bootblocks in a disk partition SYNOPSIS
installboot bootblk raw-disk-device The boot(1M) program, ufsboot, is loaded from disk by the bootblock program which resides in the boot area of a disk partition. The ufs boot objects are platform-dependent, and reside in the /usr/platform/platform-name/lib/fs/ufs directory. The platform name can be found using the -i option of uname(1). The installboot utility is a SPARC only program. It is not supported on the architecture. users should use installgrub(1M) instead. bootblk The name of the bootblock code. raw-disk-device The name of the disk device onto which the bootblock code is to be installed; it must be a character device which is read- able and writable. Naming conventions for a SCSI or IPI drive are c?t?d?s? and c?d?s? for an IDE drive. Example 1: Installing UFS Boot Block To install a ufs boot block on slice 0 of target 0 on controller 1 of the platform where the command is being run, use: example# installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 /usr/platform/platform-name/lib/fs/ufs directory where ufs boot objects reside. /platform/platform-name/ufsboot second level program to boot from a disk or CD See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ od(1), uname(1), boot(1M), init(1M), kadb(1M), kernel(1M), monitor(1M), reboot(1M), rpc.bootparamd(1M), init.d(4), attributes(5) WARNINGS
The installboot utility fails if the bootblk or openfirmware files do not exist or if the raw disk device is not a character device. 11 Apr 2005 installboot(1M)
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