On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 09:57:35PM +0000, tetrahe...@danwin1210.me wrote: > On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 12:46:50PM +0000, tetrahe...@danwin1210.me wrote: > > - when booting from the bootloader on the internal HD, and after > > decrypting the encrypted volume, the system is able to find the disk > > e8xxxx without trouble, but > > > > - when booting from the bootloader on the USB stick, and after > > decrypting the same encrypted volume (with the same password, etc), > > the system is NOT able to find the disk e8xxxx. > > > > What the heck is going on? Why can't the system find softraid volume > > that it just decrypted? > > Still haven't been able to find a solution to this. The boot, softraid, > installboot manpages (as far as I can tell) offer no answers. > > Does anyone here understand how the kernel looks for available volumes > during the boot sequence? > > Why would the kernel, when booted from a bootloader on one physical disk, be > able to find a root device -- but, when booted from a bootloader on a > different physical disk, not be able to do so? (even when the bootloaders in > both cases decrypted the correct disk)
In general, crypto softraid volumes don't auto-assemble. FDE boot only works because the kernel and boot-loader cooperate to make sure that the softraid volume the kernel was booted from will be assembled. Other volumes won't be assembled. You can expect to mount a softraid root disk on the USB stick when booting off USB, but not from any other disk. Your setup is missing a way to effectively run the right 'bioctl -C ...' command to set up the missing volume. bioctl sits in the root filesystem so there is a chicken-and-egg problem with running bioctl. You'd have to change the bootloader and kernel to do the equivalent for you. If you're not comfortable to fix the kernel and/or bootloader yourself for this use case, just go with the working setup everyone else is using.
