Hello everyone,
Last night, I installed the Gnome edition and upon booting, I was asked to enter the password for a secondary LUKS encrypted drive.
Is this new and must be done or, did I make a mistake during install. I have selected GRUB as the bootloader but all my other PCs use Systemd boot.
To be clear. I use internal hard drives to back up all work and the main HD is only for the OS. The work drive is always encrypted. Every time I boot, CachyOS asks for the password of that drive or it won’t boot.
I don’t want to decrypt the drive at boot time and would prefer if someone could tell me how to change this. I don’t mind re-installing if that solves the issue.
Earlier, I re-installed, selected the default systemd boot option and it is all fixed. @naim
sorry, i should have been more clear. I was talking about a “second” internal hard drive which only stores work files. Until a few months ago, I would encrypt everything but now, I leave the OS as is and encrypt the storage drives only.
To anyone experiencing this down the road, my issue was most likely caused by selecting GRUB which I have never done before. I was interested to play with snapshots which has to wait.
@vancouver Don’t need grub to play with snapshots. The CachyOS team has setup a package that sets snapper that works awesome so that you really don’t need to use Grub to rollback a snapshot. Just install the cachyos-snapper-support package from command prompt (this can also be done by clicking the Install Snapper support button on the Apps/Tweaks page of CachyOS Hello app). Then you are pretty much set for root snapshots. Every time you install anything with pacman (or the AUR helper of your choice I like the preinstalled paru). The system will automatically take before and after snapshots. 99% of the time if you install and update and things aren’t working right you are still going to be able to get into your system and just run the BTRFS Assistant select the snapper snapshot you want to roll back located on the browse/restore tab of the snapper tab in BTRFS Assistant and click restore and then do as it tells you and restart your computer immediately. Also if you have a bunch of applications launch at startup you should close out of applications / docker/podman containers / etc. as a best practice.
The only real artifact from restoring a snapshot to a previous version is that you’ll find your pacman db is locked (you’ll get an error message if trying to install something new using pacman or an AUR helper). This can simply be corrected by deleting the db.lck file.
sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck
This can also be done through the Apps/Tweaks page in the CachyOS Hello by selecting the “Remove db lock” button.
BTRFS Assistant really makes managing snapper super easy without having to use the command line to do just about anything. In the rare case where you can’t get into your desktop environment or boot your system then follow the instructions on the arch linux wiki to restore your snapshot. Personally I’ve never had to restore it this way but it’s good to know the step by step instructions are there if everything goes wrong lol.
Thank you @cbDejaVu
You’ve provided some good info on a topic that doesn’t have much to begin with.
The reason for me mentioning GRUB was that I have never used that option before as I always boot CachyOS with the default systemd boot.
Anyway, the issue has resolved itself after a fresh install. At them moment, I use ext4 and unlike previously, where I spread out the workload over several computers, I now run two identical machines that save all work to secondary and external drives.
Soon it will be a year since I discovered CachyOS and I never had a bad experience that needed a roll-back. CachyOS just works … like me.
