Yesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I decided to a fresh install. Its been over a year since I did a clean install so I had a lot of cruft installed, so a clean install would take care of that, and would probably take less time than repairing the install.
I installed the Intel SSD as the primary hard disk and moved my OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD to be the secondary, and my LUKS Encrypted “deep storage” drive, a 2TB Western Digital Black drive to be the third disk. By keeping the OCZ SSD as the second drive, I can still access all of my configuration files and everything else thats on it quite easily. Once I finish migrating things, I’ll make that either my /var or /home directory.
One thing that I missed initially during the migration though was the /etc/crypttab file. This is needed when mounting the LUKS drive during boot. Without it, you’ll have to setup the mapper and mount it manually, or by opening it from the desktop. During boot is my preferred method.
So, if you are moving a LUKS drive or doing a fresh install, make sure you grab the /etc/crypttab file and put it into the new install’s /etc directory. Once thats done, when you reboot, it will be listed in /dev/mapper/some_name and you’ll be able to include it in your /etc/fstab again.
If anyone wants specific examples, just let me know and I’ll post them.
