In my journey I noticed most people using LVM with LUKS. I did not go that route because I already my primary distro (Slackware) installed and I did not want to reinstall anything. I just wanted to convert the VM to physical, but that partition had to be encrypted. Without encryption I did the whole P2V thing in less than an hour.

The encryption is non negotiable. I have to have encryption on that partition because everything there is work related and this is a laptop (that is easily stolen). I don't use the Slackware partition on the laptop much other than web browsing. My office desktop is Slackware and does all of my heavy work.

Perhaps I could have gone LVM and reinstalled both distros. I have good backups and could re-image the Slackware partition easily enough. I still have my spinner HD from when I installed the SSD. So perhaps a snowy day project this winter will be to try that.

An irony to all of this is I now have a laptop at work that I will be using and no longer need to BYO. We (I) also will be building a Linux desktop workstation at work. I am in the process of converting all laptops at work to Linux and all must be encrypted. I haven't yet decided if I am going to encrypt the workstation.

Not that my little exercise was futile. I learned a lot about LUKS. That helps a lot with efforts at work to encrypt all laptops.

Not using Slackware at work though.