Hello good folks of LQ,

just stopping by to describe an issue I ran into, in case the same should happen to others. My apologies if this is a duplicate; I did a search, but this might show up under all kinds of descriptions.

I'm in the process of moving my machines to Slackware 14.1, not by upgrading, but by doing fresh installations. All my partitions (except /boot) are LUKS encrypted volumes. My mkinitrd line contains the appropriate -C parameter.

The problem: During the boot process, I'm asked for the password of my root partition, as expected. Instead of unlocking it though, I'm getting a message saying we're missing /sbin/dmsetup. And that's it, the process can't go on.

Long story short: After some searching, I messed with my mkinitrd.gz using the method described in here (German), booting from the installation disc and placing the system's /sbin/dmsetup manually into the initrd.gz

This seems to work. Has anyone else experienced this? Am I doing something obviously wrong? Perhaps this might be a bug in mkinitrd?

Anyway, thought I would post this here, and hope it helps someone.
Cheers!

Hello,

There is no reason that you should tinker manually with initrd.gz image file.

I think it would be helpful if you could post the exact mkinitrd command that you used (including the parameters) and explain the layout of your partitions (ex: /dev/sda1 = /boot, ...).

Could your problem be what is described here, or maybe here ?

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Yes sir, it could! Thanks, metageek. What morr is describing in post #7 (adding the -L switch to mkinitrd) would have achieved with much greater comfort what I did manually.

I have to say, though, that the description in the man page didn't exactly point me that way, as I'm not using LVM and had no clue what tools they might be talking about: "-L This option adds LVM support to the initrd, if the tools are available on the system."

That's what I thought, too.
Nonetheless, I couldn't find any other sensible way to boot my system, and the tinkering resolved the problem.
Apart from the abovementioned -L switch, the mkinitrd call was fine.

Anyway, I learned something along the way, and with metageek's linked thread above, I now know how to solve the issue next time without manual interference. Thanks!