if I encrypt my home partition using Mint 11 and some time in the future I decide to install another linux distro will I lose access to my home partition????

Do you know for a fact your home directory is indeed on a different partition from that of the operating system? If I were you I'd just back up the entire home directory to a flash drive, external drive, something safe that the new install would not and could not mess with.

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thx for the reply.

I posted a similar post in the security forum. Since I get a reply there first, you and anyone can follow the link there

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tition-905505/

I'm more interested in the actual answer to this question "yes" or "no" with sourcing information. It's easy to back up and you should have a backup already.

But I too want to know to you have to format the home partition or can you just include it in a new OS install.

I found some articles but none of them are a good solution to our question.

My guess would be the following.

1. Install Ubuntu creating all of your desired partitions except a separate home partition and leave it unencrypted.
2. Create a username and password that was the same as your previous system. Then mount the home partition like this article to test.

I'm still trying to figure out the semantics of decrypting while logging in but simply saying just back everything up and reinstall is lazy and not a solution to this problem. Linux wasn't made like that; it's not Windows.

Once you get the correct mount then modify /etc/fstab and add an entry by UUID. If you don't know how to do that then it should look something like the following.
If you don't know how to get the UUID then you can figure it out with this command.
Which will list all of your UUIDs linked to your devices.

@Dave_P: Please do not mark this as solved yet. I'd like to see more input from other community members.

SAM

Ah I finally figured it out. It's as easy as including the partition during install. The partition itself isn't encrypted. Just the users' directory contents. So you can mount it like a normal drive. On my system (Kubuntu 10.04LTS), I can list the following.
I think this needs to be tested more but it seems simple enough. Just remember for the decryption to work properly you need to have the exact same username and password as your previous system.

Here's some more information on the subject.

@ sag47

I already solved it, here is my solution
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post4485401

As long as you have luks on a separate partition and use the same program to encrypt it i.e cryptsetup. you can open, mount it, or close it in any distro with cryptsetup installed.

Don't worry, people sometimes will reply and read SOLVED threads if they have something to share or add what worked for them and others will be curious on how something was solved.

Thanks for your input