I succesfully encryptd a partition (non-ROOT) while installing openSUSE 11.1 . I was wondering after that what happens with that partition if for example i have to reinstall my system. And guess what??
While re-installing it didn’t want to mount it as it didn’t see what type that partition was BUT after installation i mounted it without a problem and have all my files back(it just asked for a new passphrase)!! Is it supposed to work like that???
Say someone loses laptop, thief sees it’s openSUSE so he installs openSUSE on external disk and mounts that partition and just gives new passphrase and voila!! Encrypted partition my A**!!
>
> I succesfully encryptd a partition (non-ROOT) while installing openSUSE
> 11.1 . I was wondering after that what happens with that partition if
> for example i have to reinstall my system. And guess what??
>
> While installing it didn’t want to mount it as it didn’t see that
> partition BUT after installation i mounted it without a problem and have
> all my files back(it just asked for a new passphrase)!! Is it supposed
> to work like that???
>
> Say someone loses laptop, thief sees it’s openSUSE so he installs
> openSUSE on external disk and mounts that partition and just gives new
> passphrase and voila!! Encrypted partition my A**!!
>
>
This must be a new issue, because I had a test system setup with openSUSE
11.0 and the I went to install openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 over it the only way I
could even reuse the partition was to reformat it. If you can repeat it and
get the same result I would bring this up in the bugzilla because that
defeats the propose of encrypting a partition in the first place.
Person from another thread made me afraid that i will lose my encrypted partition when reinstalling system.
I could not reproduce that when using another passphrase than with that used when creating encrypted partition.
So looks like i was wrong and the decryption key is actually placed on the encrypted partition.
I read Novell documentation before that but it didn’t mention anything where are any keys stored or something like that.
The conclusion: I encrypt all my partitions
I propose adding this link to the HowTo “Encrypting root file system”, it explains A LOT how it works because Novell documentation is at least not clear how the encrypting works.
