I am in the unfortunate situation of having installed exactly this configuration in the middle of December 2021. Ubuntu 21.10 encrypted ZFS with root and boot both encrypted, with luks. All done with the graphical installer (so no manual tinkering)
It has worked with no issues until middle of this week, where I installed I think lm-sensors which caused an immediate "flash" reboot. Basically an immediate power-cycle.
After that I could never boot the disk anymore. If I boot with a liveCD I see the ssd with 4 partitions. Badblocks shows 0 error, smartctl too.
per fdisk I have:
- an EFI system partition 512 Mbyte
- Linux swap (which is actually a 2Gbyte luks partition)
- Solaris boot (which is zfs in reality)
- Solaris root (which is also zfs)
I checked with hexdump the "linux swap" partition and the luks header (at least the beginning) is not overwritten.
Still I cannot open the luks partition, the password is 100% correct (It doesn't have any special characters, just letters and numbers). I checked the spelling, keyboard layout, tried with echoing the password to cryptsetup... "no key available with this passphrase"
I have some usb disks also encrypted with luks (and with the same password :) ) and they open allright with the same liveCD. Cipher is also the same type. And those were created by this very laptop with the now non-functioning installation, so probaly "PASSPHRASE CHARACTER
SET" is not the issue.
So I began to wonder whether it is the correct way at all to access the encrypted zfs root partition.
I cannot find information on how the graphical installer sets up these fully encrypted partitions, how the whole thing is managed, unlocked, etc.
The question: am I doing it in the right way to try to unlock the luks partition first? If that's the way then probably the system is really shot and I lost the data.
