February 01, 2014

Mounting Encrypted lvm Volumes From a Live CD

I once again fried my system and had to recover some files from an encrypted filesystem via a Live CD. It’s a frustrating experience. I tried both Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu 13.10.

First, after you boot it will show an encrypted filesystem icon. If you click on that the system will prompt for your password. After you enter your password, it will complain that the partition is invalid and can’t be mounted.

I’ve seen this before. In the past I would simply run sudo apt-get install lvm2 and the volumes would appear.

This time around, I was having no such luck. After some surfing, I found this Ubuntu Forums thread.

It basically worked. Here’s the exact sequence I followed on my system:

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup
sudo modprobe dm-crypt
sudo apt-get install lvm2
sudo modprobe dm-mod
sudo vgscan # this outputs the volume name
sudo vgchange -a y volume_name_from_above

After the last step, my encrypted volumes magically appeared on my desktop.

Hope this helps some other poor soul,

Grant