If you guys need all the details I can provide them. I am installing 10.3 on a PARTITION ONLY. LVM on Luks. Same result whether I use luks2 or luks1 volume header.

Example:
cryptsetup luksFormat -c serpent-xts-plain64 -s 512 -h sha512 -i 25000 /dev/sda4

or

cryptsetup luksFormat --type luks1 -c serpent-xts-plain64 -s 512 -h sha512 -i 25000 /dev/sda4

open volume after creation, setup pv's, vg's, lv's, and partitioning with all mount points properly set.

The install goes smooth as silk. I have done partition installs several times with Jessie, Stretch, etc... and my machine bios is Legacy with CSM support. UEFI is turned off but the debian installer still sees it somehow. Hard drive is MBR not GPT. It has always seen UEFI and as mentioned above it boots great on my older Debian partition systems. All of my Debian systems boot from USB for /boot. Some I created directly to USB mount, and on others I moved the /boot file from sda3 over to a flash and edited fstab to make it work, easily.

I cannot get 10.3 to boot after install, and I am beating myself up trying to work through this. I have installed this to sda4 (100 Gig) and tried booting from sda3 (256 meg EXT 2 partition for /boot), and also tried installing with a direct call to a USB (sdb obviously). Nope won't boot.

During the install process with everything setup and down to the point where it is time to Install the bootloader I stop and drop to busybox (Alt F2). Then:


chroot /target /bin/bash
nano /etc/crypttab
"George" /dev/sda4 none luks # George is example name here for Volume

Then save and exit, leave busybox and go back to complete the install to bootloader. I have done this several times with no joy.

When I try to mount Debian I see volume group "George" not found and after sitting for like 15 seconds it drops me down to a shell of some kind. I am pretty confident I am missing something simple here. I know the machine works extremely well booting from flash.

Does anyone see what I appear to be missing? I will need some defined steps as "super geek" comments will further baffle me I think. I really have been trying and I didn't want to resort to asking for help until I beat myself up for awhile.

I do know a little bit about partitions, LVM and disk encryption, but I have trouble understanding what you are doing.

Here is a contradiction. You say partition only, then immediately LVM. You can install an OS on a partition only, or on LVM. Not both.

You then say you encrypt /dev/sda4, and:
What do you mean by volume?
You set up PVs, VGs, LVs on what? And what do you mean by partitioning? Normally, you first have a partition, then you create a PV on it.
Sorry but this came as a surprise. You encrypt /dev/sda4, set up some LVM volumes and mount them somewhere, then suddenly you install. Where do you install to?
What do you mean that the install was smooth - according to the rest of your description, it wasn't at all.

The next paragraph doesn't seem to be relevant to your problem, and then:
You installed on /dev/sda4. This means that you removed all the structures you created earlier? What precisely was on /dev/sda4 before the installation, and what storage setup did you create when installing?
I don't know what you mean by "installing with a direct call to a USB".
And here is where you would normally provide details of what happens when you try to boot. Any messages on the screen? Any error messages? Just a blank screen? What do you get?
What do you mean by "no joy"? What happens, and what did you expect to happen?
By the way, from the above it seems to me that you are using the encrypted disk as the root disk to which you install Debian.
What do you mean by that?
I doubt that the mount command issues an error "volume group not found".
What exactly are you doing, and what exactly happens?
By now I am lost. How can the mount command drop you to a shell? Or rather: What did you do to mount Debian?