Hello

I was testing dm-crypt to make an encrypted partition on my computer.

I made it, mounted it tested it, umounted, remounted etc etc to test it.

Then I wondered what happens if my computer breaks and I need to get the data from that partition? Can I put it in another computer, and just mount it, like I normally did.

It seems that iwth dm-crypt, you need to make the loop everytime you reboot, before you can mount it:

you then mount it with:
# mount /dev/mapper/cryptvol1 /mnt/crypt

To test if I could just move the drive to a new computer, I used Gentoo LiveCD. When I ran the above command, which should make the encrypted filesystem on /dev/hdb2, I used the same passphrase which I had set up the system with.

the I tried to mount it (as above), but I was told that I needed to say a filesystem. I tried ext3, but it didn't like that.

It seemed that it didn't want to be mounted.

Does anyone have experience of this? Is i possible to move the hard drive to a new machine?
Hamish

I have figured out one error I may have made. I may have omitted to create a file system on the /dev/mapper/cryptvol1 file. I just made one on /dev/hdb3.

it seems to work, but I will test some more.

Does anyone know what would happen if a RAID1 (/dev/md0) partition had encryption, and one of the drives broke? How would this be affected?

hamish

hehe

was just reading through old stuff.

I've been running it for months now.

If one drive breaks, but boot up with Gentoo live cd and remake this:

cryptsetup.sh -c aes -h ripemd160 -y -b `blockdev --getsize /dev/hdb2` create cryptvol1 /dev/hdb2

then mount it (you will be asked for passphrase)

This works, even if /dev/hdb2 is normally in a raid array. The gentoo live cd does not know this, and just mounts it as an indiviual drive.

hamish