Order in which passphrase is asked for encrypted volumes

Posted by Lars Kotthoff on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Lars Kotthoff
Published on 2012-10-27T22:18:25Z Indexed on 2012/10/27 23:20 UTC
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I have installed 12.10 on a machine with two disks. The root partition is on one disk, the swap partition on the other. Both disks are encrypted and I have added the corresponding entries to /etc/crypttab.

During boot, it asks for the passphrase for the disk with the root filesystem. Then it continues booting and gets to the login screen before I get a chance to enter the passphrase for the other disk. After logging in, I verified that it was actually waiting for me to enter the passphrase for that second partition (askpass process is running). But at that point, I have no way of entering the passphrase anymore.

The manpage for crypttab suggests that the order in which the volumes are specified matters, so I changed it to have the swap disk first. I updated the initramfs and grub afterwards, but it didn't make any difference.

How can I specify the order in which the encrypted partitions are unlocked? I'm looking for a solution that either asks for the swap passphrase first or tells the system to wait until all encrypted partitions are unlocked before displaying the login screen.

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