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I need an advice about a bad situation.

I was installing a new linux ditro by using my main PC. I booted with the ISO and then installed the distro on /dev/sdc, which was an external USB drive. My bad, I didn't realized when installing, that I didn't change the boot loader installation on the same drive, but I left on /dev/sda, which holds my main operating system (LUKS encrypted).

Obviuosly after this, the main operating system is not booting any more, and I see an errror message from GRUB saying:

error: no such cryptodisk found

Now, I have a clonezilla backup of my /dev/sda/, and in the file list, among other files, I see

12/04/2022 04:59 AM 10 parts 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 38 sda-chs.sf 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 1,048,064 sda-hidden-data-after-mbr 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 512 sda-mbr 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 391 sda-pt.parted 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 338 sda-pt.parted.compact 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 267 sda-pt.sf 12/03/2022 11:41 PM 118,196,482 sda1.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa 12/04/2022 04:59 AM 512 sda2-ebr

I hope some of these backups can help me in restore the situation (may be sda-mbr and sda-hidden-data-after-mbr?), but I'd like to ask your help before doing anything, in order to avoid more damage.

Anyone can advice how to recover the situation?

Thanks so much!!

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2 Answers 2

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UEFI or BIOS installs. Looks more like BIOS as you have MBR and maybe grub's core.img which is in the sectors after the MBR. Most systems now are UEFI and prefer gpt partitioning.

If you plug in external drive, does it boot? Update it to see encrypted install.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup sudo modprobe dm-crypt sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdXY my-crypt sudo os-prober sudo update-grub

And then install grub from external drive to external drive's MBR. And from encrypted install install grub to sda. So internal drive boots normally.

Also what version of grub? Nowadays GRUB (v2.06) allows to boot Linux from a LUKS-encrypted /boot partition (even one inside a LVM) with the GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK=y key and the appropriate LUKS or LUKS2 modules loaded.

Otherwise you can use live installer.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/63594/mount-encrypted-volumes-from-command-line

http://askubuntu.com/questions/719409/how-to-reinstall-grub-from-a-liveusb-if-the-partition-is-encrypted-and-there-i?rq=1

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  • Thanks for your answer. Yes, it's a BIOS install. I can boot with a live distro. I'm taking a backup now, as soon as it finish I'll try one of the solution you linked. Thanks Commented Feb 25, 2023 at 15:38
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OK, I was able to solve with the following commands:

sudo -i apt-get update apt-get install cryptsetup lvm2 fdisk -l cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda? TAG vgchange -ay vgscan vgchange -ay [VOLUME GROUP NAME] # From the above command lvscan mount /dev/[VOLUME GROUP NAME]/[LOGICAL VOLUME NAME] /mnt # LOGICAL VOLUME NAME from above command cd /mnt mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done chroot /mnt grub-install /dev/sda update-grub for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo umount /mnt$i; done umount /mnt vgchange -an cryptsetup luksClose TAG

Now I have to solve a kind of mixup with devices, but I'm able to boot up the system.

Thanks a lot for the help @oldfred

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