Can EOS’ Calamares accommodate using an existing LUKS-home partition? How do i make Calamares ask for the existing LUKS password? Can this be done without needing to reformat the existing partition, thus lose current data?
Details & Pictures
Today I tried but failed to convert my single-boot [GPT+BIOS] Debian laptop with separate LUKS-home partition, into dual-boot with the new EOS root partition sharing that same existing LUKS-home partition. My problem is that EOS’ Calamares did not ask for my existing LUKS-home password. I know how to create a new LUKS-home partition, for which Calamares does prompt for my desired password, but that involves formatting the partition - that’s undesirable here in a situation necessitating using an existing partition containing data.
I’d told it to not format, but only to mount, that partition as my /home, & afaik it should have then prompted me for my password. I chose to continue in hope that maybe later it might do so, but it never did. Sure enough after reboot, I got the EOS boot menu, but from there it waits & waits & waits after mounting the new EOS root partition, but never asks me for my home partition LUKS password [logically because it never solicited it from me during installation], hence eventually lands me in a rescue screen.
In order to experiment more freely, I’ve temporarily put the laptop aside, & created a new VM in my other pc, pretty closely mimicking the laptop partition table arrangement. Sadly, I have reached the same unsuccessful outcome.
Following is my VM’s partition info [as seen from within the Debian boot], then some VM EOS Calamares pictures. My assumption is that if I can solve this for the VM, I should then be able to apply that same method to my laptop
I don’t think that Calamares itself supports unlocking and installing partition.
If it is only your /home partition that is luks encrypted, I would just exclude it during the install and then add it in afterwards.
Alternatively, you could unlock it with cryptsetup before starting the installer and then calamares will be able to see it. However, I have never tested this approach to see if it works so you might consider testing that in a VM first.
Inspired genius! To my initially sceptical disbelief, it really was as simple as doing this [& I accomplished it by the easy expedient of using Dolphin].
Thank you.
Summary
I had a strong clue that it was going to succeed this time, long before the end, because I noticed a subtle, yet I thought significant change. Yesterday, with my LUKS-home Closed, the Calamares post-setup pre-install Summary said it was going to do:
To my delight, this time, once Calamares was finished & I rebooted [both VM, then later laptop], after the grub boot menu I was prompted for my LUKS password, which was accepted & thereafter I reached SDDM thence my new Plasma desktop. Excellent.
As EOS already had os-prober installed, all I needed to do was append GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to my /etc/default/grub, run sudo update-grub [after installing it from AUR of course], then upon reboot my EOS grub boot menu correctly displayed all my Sparky kernels as well. Cool.
I see @dalto that you’ve lost none of your perspicuity since I last interacted with you, in a faraway forum in a faraway time, for a long ago distro…