[aklug] Code blue, patient not responding

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Hi. One of my servers at home got fried during a power fluctuation. It
was a Compaq Presario with an AMD Sempron (32-bit) processor (1.8 Ghz, I
think) and a 150 GB hard drive. The motherboard is toast, unfortunately,
but the hard drive seems to be intact and fully functional.

I transplanted the hard drive to an older Dell Dimension 4100, with a 1
GHz, 32-bit Pentium III. My desire is to simply use this hard drive in
the Dell without wiping it or reinstalling anything. While there is no
critical data that would be lost by wiping the drive, it nevertheless
would be a real bother to start from scratch again, as it would mean
configuring afresh a lot of server settings and database configurations.
So I'd rather just boot the hard-drive in the new machine and continue
as before, minus some processing power.

My problem: The hard drive utilized LVM layered on top of 256-bit
encryption. The boot directory was on one partition, and the other
partition was encrypted, with two logical volumes (if I remember
correctly). The system on the hard drive is a Debian Lenny 32-bit OS.

The hard drive boots fine and goes through GRUB fine. But after it loads
the kernel, it comes to the place where it would normally ask for my
encryption passkey. Instead of that, I get this:

START QUOTE
Volume group "alpha" not found
Volume group "alpha" not found
cryptsetup: source device /dev/hdc2 not found
cryptsetup: source device /dev/hdc2 not found
Begin: Waiting for root file system ... done.
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
(... A few lines suggesting what might be the problem ...)
ALERT! /dev/mapper/alpha-001 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
END QUOTE

Then it drops me to a BusyBox shell, with a minimal file-system which
does not include a home directory or any of the data from the encrypted
file-systems.

I attempted to fix the problem by switching the hard drive to the other
IDE cable, but that had no effect. Anyone have an idea how I can fix
this? I have access to the PC's BIOS, as well as the GRUB menu (I
remember the password for making changes), as well as this busy box
shell. Is there a boot option or something I should change so that the
kernel knows where to look for the encrypted data?

- --
Christopher Howard
http://indicium.us
http://theologia.indicium.us

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Received on Thu Jun 11 02:16:02 2009