I set up a encrypted partition on my SuSE 10 system during installation, and now I'm trying unsuccessfully to access it. It is the only thing listed in /etc/cryptotab and shows it having a reiserfs file system, but when I go to mount it, I have had no luck whatsoever. Even mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdx /lock and mount -t auto /dev/hdx /lock informs me that it cannot access the file system though I entered a correct password for it during bootup. How can I get it working and it be secure?

Could you post the /etc/crypto line, minus any hashed password or key info, and the directory contents of /dev/mapper/ and /proc/crypto/ and the results of "lsmod | grep dm_".

The fstab entry should look like this:
There should be a line in crypttab that starts with the crypto device name. That is the device to use in /etc/fstab.

The example I posted is a loop crypto device.

It is the device part that you got wrong. However, reiser isn't supported by SuSE anymore so you might want to use a different filesystem.

If you make yourself the owner of the mounted filesystem, and add the options "noauto,user" for the options, you can mount it yourself without using sudo. Change the permissions to rwx------. Now you can even put the mount command in ~/.profile to mount it when you login.

You are encrypting a partition and not a file, but I think that the you want to look in /dev/mapper/ for the device. ( I wan't willing to repartition my drive to test that out )

Found the problem: It seems that Novel/SuSE, in all their glory, forgot to add the "0 0: bytes to the end of the lines within the /etc/cryptotab file. That's an easy error to miss, but makes such a big difference. Not sure what they mean (the same thing appears in the fstab), but they're important.

Check out 'man fstab' for the full story. Here's the basic point: