After apt full-upgrade boot drops to busybox with error about uuid (encrypted drive)

hallo. with a lot of help from @redgreen925 I upgraded my neon system from jammy to noble. however when I rebooted the system after the upgrade I found I could not get past kernel load!

I looked at three kernels, all of which error out the same (drop to busybox with error about uuid not found).

note, the hard drive is encrypted! it decrypts fine and I am communicating from a live disk environment.

the kernels do not appear to mount the root partition, though the grub is booting from it (after decryption on system power on)

the uuid given by the error is different to the uuid for the root drive in /etc/fstab (also in crypttab, which I do not know a lot about)

any help appreciated.

-edit1-

[added neon tag]

This isn’t a kde problem, more your luks encrypted drive isn’t setup properly to boot from.

Check you have setup your /etc/crypttab properly with the correct UUID, and then check you setup your grub bootloader properly adding the cryptdevice and root options so it knows where to find and unlock them.

If that’s done, just verify you are using the right UUID’s for each, either by using the “cryptsetup luksUUID $device” to output the luks volume UUID and “ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid” to get the root one. There are plenty of how-to’s for more detail.

hallo.

thank you for your reply.

with the command you provided I reconfirmed that fstab and crypttab have correct entries for the UUIDs for the system hard drive (sda1/sda2).

though these entries are correct (from what I see) after loading the kernel and running through some boot process, the system will drop to busybox with an error bout unable to load the drive, though the drive UUID that system provides is neither that of the system drive nor the swap drive.

I have also chrooted into the drive and re-run update-grub, which appeared to work correctly.

during the system update there was a prompt for where to install grub, on /dev/sda1 or dm-0 - I opted for /dev/sda1, should I have installed the bootloader on dm-0?

the system was booting fine before running this update, if this is not the correct location to find support, please suggest one?

thanks again for your reply!

Odd an update nuked it, perhaps the initcpio for the luks additions got wiped out? You checked your /etc/default/grub and /boot/grub/grub.cfg in boot has the correct entries for luks and the root there?

I had a bad arch update a few years ago that someone changed the base hooks for plymouth+luks in the mkinitcpio to break rebuilding the kernel with encryption and didn’t notice until reboot threw me to busybox. Maybe something like this, why I say check your initcpio hooks.

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thanks for the reply!

yeah it is a little strange that a system update affected grub like this, I do not know a lot about encrypted drives so it could be to do with that.

looking at boot/grub.cfg the set-root flag points to this “other” uuid, which I do not know what which drive that was?

cryptomount -u 6ad45b67-3030-487a-9d7c-9398fc38219f
set root='cryptouuid/6ad45b673030487a9d7c9398fc38219f'
if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint='cryptouuid/6ad45b673030487a9d7c9398fc38219f'  8be7b9bd-c84c-4276-b688-6996b801d469
else
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 8be7b9bd-c84c-4276-b688-6996b801d469

the “6ad45 … 8219f” uuid is the partition /dev/sda1 after decryption, however during system startup (past decryption and grub kernel selection) the loader is erroring on the set-root uuid, “8be7b … 1d469”, which I do not know what that is?

in fstab and cryptab there are only lines for sda1 (“6ad45 … 8219f”) and a swap partition, which has another uuid from the set-root uuid.

any support appreciated, thanks again.

hallo again. I have looked for solutions on the web and could not find this precise issue, though there are a lot of posts with the error about the uuid not being found.

the drive appears fine in the live disk environment, sda1 with system and home, sda2 with swap, the uuids are present in grub.cfg however there is another uuid which I do not know where it is from?

when I ran full-upgrade there was a screen to select device to make grub install to, either sda or dm0, I chose sda however was that the right choice?

any advice would be appreciated.

thanks!