Saturday, May 07, 2011

Ubuntu 10.10->11.04 encrypted LVM fail, rebuilding initramfs, rdinit

One of my workstations was an Ubuntu 10.10 on an encrypted LVM. I decided to upgrade to 11.04 and was unable to boot, falling back to initramfs busybox shell.

If you are not familiar with this kind of setup, it basically works with:
  • a non-encrypted /boot with kernel and initramfs
  • initramfs contains required modules (aes, lvm, etc.) and a few scripts to mount the filesystem: in this case, a script to ask for the password, decrypt the LVM and mount the root filesystem