85 ed questions

@StephenKitt maybe you can help me out. I borked my system, couldn't boot. I finally managed to boot using one of the fallback options in grub, one that falls back onto initrd. That got me to a rescue shell where I manually decrypted my encrypted /home, set up a mapping for it, mounted it as /home, then continued the boot process and am finally in a working system.

I don't know how to make it work for my next reboot though. Am I stuck using the fallback for ever? I just don't know enough about the init process to really grok what is happening.

Oh, encrypted /home. Someone likes living their life extra dangerously :-) One of the reasons I never encrypt any partitions is that it's too hard to recover the data from them when things break. If I need something encrypted, I encrypt separate files. Also, backup of encrypted partitions is not fun; You either save an image of the disk (need too much space) or back up the unencrypted contents (why encrypt?).

I know, but it's a work laptop and it's policy. I used to have just my work dir encrypted, but figured I should do the whole disk this time.

I wouldn't encrypt by choice, precisely to avoid a whole extra layer of complication when things break.

I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer here, it’s been a while since I’ve had to poke around GRUB.

I also run everything encrypted, I’ve even got Clevis and Tang setup so that some systems can be automatically decrypted if they’re on the home network...

And yes, I back up with encryption but done differently ;-).

@StephenKitt Sigh. You were my only hope, Obi Kitt!

I managed to get the damn thing to boot now, but only with the fallback option. I boot to a rescue shell, manually create the encrypted drive mapping and mount it, then exit the rescue to continue boot where I am prompted for the decrypt password and after that everything works.

So I am SOOOOOOoooooo close, dammit!

bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2193606#p2193606

Posted this part to the Arch forums as I suspect there might be something Arch-specific there.