Booting from encrypted partition stopped working - no longer prompted for password

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

Running 13.2 x86_64 with all updates applied, nvidia proprietary driver. I have disk encryption set up with the YAST parititioner ( I assume LUKS is used ).

After updating to kernel 3.16.7 I noticed that I could not boot with it - never got asked to enter my passphrase. So I stuck to using 3.16.6 and after some other updates not even 3.16.6 would work. Sorry for being fuzzy, I don’t remember exactly when it happened.

The workaround I found was to remove the ‘splash=slient quiet’ options from the linux line in grub and got the the point where the passphrase was asked for. However, the prompt was different than the one I used to get. The old one was green text and centered in the screen, the current one has the same colour as the text and for each character I input the previous line gets echoed with an additional ‘*’ character appended. That is:

Please enter passphrase for disk BLA_BLA!: *
Please enter passphrase for disk BLA_BLA!: **
Please enter passphrase for disk BLA_BLA!: ***
Please enter passphrase for disk BLA_BLA!: ****

Once I get past that everything works fine but it’s really inconvenient. Any ideas where I should look for a better fix?

2

Try, as root:


# plymouth-set-default-theme text

That should force it to use the text theme, which is the one with a green prompt line in the middle.

No guarantees, but worth trying.

3

Doesn’t seem to work unfortunately

#plymouth-set-default-theme text -R         
Creating initrd: /boot/initrd-3.16.6-2-desktop
Executing: /usr/bin/dracut --logfile /var/log/YaST2/mkinitrd.log --force /boot/initrd-3.16.6-2-desktop 3.16.6-2-desktop
(... snip)
*** Creating image file ***
*** Creating image file done ***
Did not refresh the bootloader. You might need to refresh it manually.

Rebooted and behaviour was the same

4

You can try:


# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

to refresh the boot code, though I don’t know if it will help.

I have uninstalled plymouth on one system (for other reasons). And I am getting a more usable key prompt than you seem to be getting. If you try that, you will need to blacklist plymouth in Yast, else it will be installed again.

5

If you add back in the “quiet” command you might stop the echoing back of what you type (since quiet disables log messages). Instead of removing “splash=silent quiet” try changing it to “splash=verbose quiet”.

Of course this does not answer the question of why you stopped getting prompted for a password in the first place.

6

I tried that as well, did not work. Before removing plymouth I have reported this as 914698 – Regression - plymoth no longer prompts for password for encrypted partition , it is really starting to look like a valid bug.

7

With “splash=verbose quiet” the duplicate input lines are still present. However, I have way less output on the terminal, which helps :slight_smile: