How to replicate LUKS installation 100%?

jasu · n00b Joined: 23 May 2022 Posts: 53

Hi,

So I managed to somehow make my drive unbootable by removing it an inserting it back. Apparently my laptop has some secure features that make it unbootable if removed...(?)

Anyways the drive has following partitions

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2023 5:09 pm Post subject:

jasu,

To make a complete bit image of the drive, use dd.

If you want to do a new install, the GUIDs of the partitions can be preserved. I'm less sure about the UUIDs of the filesystems.
A drive image will be encrypted, just like the original

Do you have a link to your laptop manual?
That security feature is new to me.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

jasu · n00b Joined: 23 May 2022 Posts: 53

Thank you, I'll try and see what happens.

It's this one: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-dragonfly-folio-notebook-pc-customizable-5a2n1av-mb

Apparently it has some tamper lock: https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/4AA7-8167ENW.pdf

But I don't know if that is the issue..

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21706

What did you see that leads you to believe the drive is unusable in the laptop now that it was removed? You seem to believe that you can rebuild the drive's contents from the desktop, then put it back in the laptop, and expect it to work. Is that so? If yes, why do you think it will work after the rebuild, but not before?

If I had to guess, I would suspect this is not a security feature, but an annoying firmware behavior I have seen referenced in other forum posts. Specifically, some firmware will "helpfully" delete all boot entries that are hosted on non-present drives. If this happened to you, then your boot entry would be forgotten if you started the laptop without the drive. Inserting the drive and regenerating the boot entry would be sufficient to recover from this. No reinstall would be needed.

Cloning an encrypted system is not meaningfully different, because in most cases you don't want to clone it bit-for-bit. If you approach this as filesystem level cloning, then the encryption is out of sight of the cloning tool.

jasu · n00b Joined: 23 May 2022 Posts: 53

I was thinking about cloning everything else except /boot.

That sounds extremely promising. Umm.. How I exactly would regenerate a boot entry?

I just remember that I also used rEFInd but that is probably not related to this.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2023 6:22 pm Post subject:

jasu,

If you can get into the firmware settings, it will show you a list of boot options that it know about.
As Hu says, Gentoo may have been removed, so the system cannot boot.

You recreate it , if that's the problem, just as you did when you installed first.

Boot your install media
Do NOT make partitions or filesystems. That would destroy your install.
Mount your partitions
Mount /sys /proc /dev and the other bits and pieces as per the handbook.
Do the chroot steps,

You are now in your own install on top of the boot media kernel and services.

Rewrite your boot entry, just as you did when you installed.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

jasu · n00b Joined: 23 May 2022 Posts: 53

The drive wasn't in the firmware's boot options.

Ah! I wasn't familiar with the terminology, I thought I had to do something with firmware itself. The problem was exactly that, the firmware had wiped the boot entries.... Thanks a lot both of you, You saved countless of hours and a lot of frustration