Cryptsetup on a separate /home partition goes into emergency mode

This worked, thanks a bunch! For future people who might have setup their system like I did and run into the same issue, here is what I did to fix:

First login as su:

sudo su

Open gdisk (check your storage’s mountpoint using lsblk before running this. For me, it was nvme0n1):

gdisk /dev/nvme0n1

Choose the following options:

Command: t
Partition number: 4 (this depends on the number of partitions. For me, /home was in the 4th partition)
Hex code or GUID: 8300

The final output should look the following way:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.10

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 4
Current type is 8302 (Linux /home)
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = 8302): 8300
Changed type of partition to 'Linux filesystem'

Verify your changes:

Command (? for help): i
Partition number (1-4): 4
Partition GUID code: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 (Linux filesystem)
Partition unique GUID: 1C0C88DA-5097-4BFC-8318-446601AB3E58
First sector: 320100352 (at 152.6 GiB)
Last sector: 3907029134 (at 1.8 TiB)
Partition size: 3586928783 sectors (1.7 TiB)
Attribute flags: 0000000000000000
Partition name: ''

Command (? for help):

libstorage-ng which is used by the installer (strictly speaking, by the YaST Partitioner module which is invoked by the installer) is based on parted and parted does have support for this special “home” partition type. I do not immediately see where the installer would use it, but I am also not intimately familiar with the code. If you can reproduce it during new installation you may consider openSUSE bug report.

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I remember while setting up openSUSE TW, it asks for setting the “partition type”. I would guess that the Partition GUID Code is generated from the options selected there, and in cases where the partition is encrypted, a certain choice type somehow chooses a faulty type.

If you see the previous post which I “solved” (Setting up Cryptsetup on a separate /home partition goes into emergency mode), openSUSE Leap never had this issue when the setup was similar. Leap has limited choices for choosing the partition type, which I think results in the correct GUID code.

I will test this out a bit more and open up a bug report!

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