- This topic has 9 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated Feb 17-12:01 pm by quiddity.
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quiddity
Old laptop running AntiX-21, not too happily. For no reason I can tell, it’s started refusing to boot properly: kernel panic, can’t find my way round it. That’s not the question here. The questions is:
I want to get some files off the HDD before doing anything drastic. I’ve tried booting with a live USB and accessing the HDD from the live session. The problem is, gparted can see the hdd partitions, and fsck says they’re fine. But I can’t access them—can’t mount them. Don’t see them in SpaceFM, going through mountbox doesn’t help … unless I’m doing something wrong there. Which is possible.
The HDD partitions are LUKS encyrpted ext4. I’m worried that the encryption is somehow messing things up; I can unencrypt them in gparted but maybe that isn’t enough? Anyone any idea how I can access them? I’m pretty new to AntiX so might well be missing soemthing obvious.
(by the way it’s the encrypted partitions that are borking the boot, I think. All goes well until I enter the encryption password, shortly after that is the kernel panic. So I guess the boot partition is fine and something has gone wrong with the other partitions. The error message is – not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exit code=0x00000100)
robertklsz
You can try pulling the HD and mounting it on an other system. Or install on an external HD and boot from that. Thant may let you get the files you want.
Hmmm. Thanks. I don’t really see how booting from an external HDD would be much different from booting from a USB. I mean, I could certainly try a live USB of a different OS, but my question was really about why I can’t do this in AntiX.
Pulling the HDD would be a pain but I guess it might come to that.
Brian Masinick
Quite a few people who use antiX today use one of the frugal modes.
At the heart of the approach, a relatively small image is booted, and then you can save a small “context” containing information you typically access.
It’s beneficial to read about this rather than look too closely at my words.
For those who like the approach, it’s fast (comparatively speaking) on old systems, but don’t mistake it for your typical system because it’s different. Instead, read about it, decide on whether it’s a good alternative for you or if you want something else.
We are definitely not a drop in replacement for everything but we are an appealing alternative for those who are willing to experiment and try an efficient approach that is different!
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Brian MasinickThanks. This sounds like good advice for thinking about what to do with the elderly laptop in the future. It doesn’t quite address the immediate problem, though. Or is the message that the problem cannot be addressed?
Brian Masinick
I’m suggesting that you can at least get on the computer by using a USB device with antiX and booting into Frugal mode. I don’t know if some form of corruption has occurred on the device you mentioned or not and I’m not personally an expert regarding LUKS encryption. I do suggest that at least antiX on a removable device will allow a means of using the computer, but not necessarily solving the other issue. It MAY be possible to solve it by booting antiX on the removable drive, then figuring out what’s preventing the device from working, but I’m not the best person to discuss the potential encryption and decryption issue.
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Brian MasinickAh I see, Yes, that’s quite right, I can indeed get the computer to work from a live USB. That works fine, or well enough anyway. It’s accessing the contents of its hard drive from the live USB session that’s the issue. I’ll keep looking for a solution to that.
Brian Masinick
Ah I see, Yes, that’s quite right, I can indeed get the computer to work from a live USB. That works fine, or well enough anyway. It’s accessing the contents of its hard drive from the live USB session that’s the issue. I’ll keep looking for a solution to that.
Ah I see, Yes, that’s quite right, I can indeed get the computer to work from a live USB. That works fine, or well enough anyway. It’s accessing the contents of its hard drive from the live USB session that’s the issue. I’ll keep looking for a solution to that.
To that end, I suggest searching the Internet for topics regarding LUKS encyrpted ext4 disk partitions. In the short run, perhaps you can decrypt the partition, get the information you want, then find a working solution; once you have a working solution, encrypt once again.
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Brian Masinickolsztyn
I do not pretend to have exact understanding of sequence of events leading to this issue but that reminds me a similar problem I had on antiX Live in the past related to encrypted Live antiX. If I remember correctly, starting with Debian 10 the default Luks encryption is Luks 2. However antiX Live is using Luks 1 encryption. As I remember you cannot read Luks 2 encrypted partition using Luks 1 decryption code.
So if the encrypted partition was encrypted using Luks 2, then antiX Live will not be able to read it. It has been some time since I had encountered such issue and I remember there was a good explanation at that time in this forum, provided I think by BitJam.
I had been using mostly encrypted (Luks) antiX until such compatibility issue made it a questionable idea so since then I dropped encryption altogether. So perhaps encryption in antiX has further evolved in the meantime but either way I am also very much interested in this and hopefully antiX experts will want to explain how exactly it is currently implemented…- This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by olsztyn.
Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_ParametersSo the puzzling thing about this is that, prior to whatever caused the kernel panic, I was booting the system from the hard drive and using the computer using an installation of AntiX. So clearly the encrypted drive could be accessed and used by AntiX. That’s why it’s puzzling that a live USB of the same OS can’t access it. Even more puzzling, I can “de-encrypt” the drive in gparted (i.e. I can enter the password, run fsck, presumably alter the partitions): I just can’t find a way to actually see and access the contents using a file browser.
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