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shiztivr

Member

Registered: 2020-03-22

Posts: 14  

How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

Yesterday, I tested doing an encrypted installation of Devuan on a virtual machine with separate boot and home partitions.
The boot partition was 512MB large, the root was 30GB large and the home partition was 8GB.

During the installation, when I was asked to install the GRUB bootloader, I chose the "Copy Files" option
and then given a choice where to install it - either sda (which was the 200GB virtual disk I made the partitions in) or dm-o, which was
the root partition.

I tried installing it in both but it failed to do so in either options. So I skipped it and because of that, I wasn't able to boot up Devuan at all.

How am I not able to install the bootloader if I'm given the choice to make a boot partition?
Where did I go wrong?

Can anyone please help me?
Thanks.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

It sounds like you made the right choices for a legacy bios system with msdos partition table. The right place to put the bootloader is /dev/sda, so it should have worked.

What error message did you get? You can check the installation log by booting the live media, mounting the home partition and getting refractainstaller.log from the user's home. The grub section should be about three-quarters of the way down the log. Look for an error message about grub.

The other way to do the install would be to install the grub-pc package before running refractainstaller, but do not let it install the bootloader at that time.  Run dpkg -i /grub-pc*.deb

After installing the package, you can install the system to hard disk, and you will be given a choice of where to put the bootloader. Choose MBR of /dev/sda. When the installer gets to the grub section, you will see a button that says 'Install bootloader' in the same place where you saw 'Copy files' the first time.

shiztivr

Member

Registered: 2020-03-22

Posts: 14  

Re: How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

The other way to do the install would be to install the grub-pc package before running refractainstaller, but do not let it install the bootloader at that time.  Run dpkg -i /grub-pc*.deb

I tried that method just now and here is the error message I got.

GRUB failed to install to the following devices:
/dev/sda

Do you want to continue anyway? If you do, your computer may not start up properly.
Writing GRUB to boot device failed - continue?

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

Is there something unusual about your setup? How did you partition the drive? Gparted? Something else? Is there 1MB free space before the first partition? Does it use gpt partition table? What's in the log around the grub-install command?

shiztivr

Member

Registered: 2020-03-22

Posts: 14  

Re: How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

Is there something unusual about your setup? How did you partition the drive? Gparted? Something else? Is there 1MB free space before the first partition? Does it use gpt partition table? What's in the log around the grub-install command?

I used GParted to create an mdos partition table.
In that table, I made three ext4 partitions: boot (/dev/sda1 512mb), root (/dev/sda2 30gb) and home (/dev/sda3 8gb).
No. There isn't any free space BEFORE the partitions but I left 60gb reserved space in my 120gb virtual hard drive.
Where do I even find this log? (Yes, I'm using live boot here)

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: How do I make an encrypted Devuan install with a separate boot?

Gparted leaves 1MB free at the beginning by default. If that's not there, it could be the reason for grub failing. Open gparted in the live session to check that it's there.

The log is in the user's home directory on the hard disk.

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
less /mnt/devuan/refractainstaller.log